There is at the very least much controversy regarding who (if anyone) actually said the famous line attributed to Marie Antoinette. However, regardless of the veracity of the quote it has gone down in history as the epitome of callousness. After all, Marie Antoinette was famous for frivolously spending France’s money on her hobby of playing peasant at a time when actual peasants could barely afford to buy food. Her penchant for spending earned her the famous nickname Madame Déficit. The attribution of the quote along with her actual conduct combine to create a picture of a woman who simply couldn’t register the immense suffering of countless real life people, because in her mind they were merely props for her own amusement.

Although the original quote is suspect, today we have a very real example of the kind of incapacity for empathy which the famous line represents. While many modern women have responded to feminism by taking on male roles with the seriousness of men, many others prefer to dabble in playing men. As a result, we have women playing warrior, playing career woman, and playing pioneer. All of this comes at immense cost to our economy, at a time when many are struggling to get by.

Unlike the large numbers of men and women who are outraged by the injustice of the family courts, the modern day Marie Antoinette looks at the great pain and injustice fathers are experiencing at the hands of the family courts and channels the famous line in one of two forms:

Let them ask for custody.

Let them pay child support.

In reality these two separate statements represent the same underlying sentiment. Those being crushed by an unjust system must have somehow had it coming. While they can’t dispute that the system is designed to be used to punish men without a need to show any actual wrongdoing, all they can think of are the great princesses who rely on the system to play strong independent woman. The unjust system gives them power, and that is more important than the suffering of innocent men and children.

Let them ask for custody.

As I have explained before, this is a specious claim because it assumes that fathers would be granted custody if they only asked for it. The reality is that men’s lawyers counsel them on their real expectations of the process and advise them to take the best deal they can hope to get. This is a classic case of what economists call bargaining in the shadow of the law. As the working paper No-Fault Divorce and Rent-Seeking explains:

…spouses engage in ‘bargaining in the shadow of the law’ (Mnookin and Kornhauser, 1979), where the existing law becomes a threat point for one of the spouses.

As an analogy, imagine a criminal court system where there was virtually no chance of being acquitted if you were part of a specific unfavored class, no matter how strong your case is. If you offer unfavored defendants in this scenario the chance to plead guilty to receive a lower sentence, they will nearly always take it because they have nothing to gain by trying to make their case for innocence. Yet you couldn’t take a 90% (unfavored class) guilty plea end result as proof that a system is fair which finds the unfavored class guilty 99% of the time cases go to trial. They are simply two sides of the same injustice.

There is another problem with the Let them ask for custody quip; it overlooks the very reason men marry and have children. Men don’t start a family to become half of a broken home, whether this is the half which pays child support or the half which gets the children. Men want to lead an intact family and work together with their wife to give their children the best. While taking a man’s children and then forcing him to pay for the honor is adding insult to injury, winning sole custody and having to pay others to do much of the parenting isn’t a great option either. Even though no doubt most men would greatly prefer the latter over the former, we shouldn’t overlook the great injustice committed by a wife who blows up her family without serious cause regardless of who wins custody. We understand this when it comes to men who walk out on their families to start a new one with a younger woman, and we should be clear about this when women indulge in the rampant female fantasy of divorce empowerment represented by movies like Eat Pray Love and Fireproof.

Let them pay child support.

There are two core claims which make up this sentiment. The first is that child support is only fair because it merely forces the man to own up to his responsibility as a father. He had sex, so he deserves to pay. But the woman had sex too, and in the vast majority of the cases she is the one who initiated the divorce. In fact, when Brinig and Allen studied the issue they found that the ability to take away the children was the biggest motivator for wives to divorce (emphasis mine):

Our results are consistent with our hypothesis that filing behavior is driven by self-interest at the time of divorce. Individuals file for divorce when there are marital assets that may be appropriated through divorce, as in the case of leaving when they have received the benefit of educational investments such as advanced degrees…

We have found that who gets the children is by far the most important component in deciding who files for divorce, particularly when there is little quarrel about property, as when the separation is long.

For those who don’t speak economist, they are saying that the reason women initiate divorce twice as often as men is because they know it gives them the opportunity to steal the children. In this context, child support isn’t forcing a man to pay for responsibilities he wasn’t willing to shoulder, it is the payment of cash and prizes to mothers who blow up their families.

But today’s grand princesses have an answer to this as well. Even though academic studies have found that the motivation was the opportunity to commit divorce theft, the man still must have had it coming. Note that they implicitly accept that losing custody and paying child support is a form of severe punishment for men. What they are arguing is the punishment is just because the men deserved it. Commenter T made this basic argument over multiple comments during a recent discussion:

Women divorce to get rid of unwanted husbands…

I assume that unwanted husbands are unwanted for good reason.

But why make such an assumption? Brinig and Allen didn’t find any reason to come to this conclusion, and the system is specifically designed not to consider fault. Women have the ability to profit from an unjust system, and all of the data suggests that they are in fact doing this, yet women like T demand that women who blow up their families be given the benefit of the doubt. As the famous line goes, provide stats for this or shut up! Men must be considered guilty until proven innocent, they argue, as this is only fair. In fact, even if you were to assume that only half or even one quarter of the men being punished by this system are innocent, this is a grave injustice. The innocent are being punished to reward the guilty! Yet whenever this debate unfolds, there is a strong tendency of those arguing for justice to try to prove that the men being punished are innocent. They unknowingly take on the female solipsists frame and have a debate about whether those convicted without any form of due process were really guilty or not. This is made even worse because no amount of hard data will convince modern day Marie Antoinettes that men don’t deserve to be crushed. As T explained in the same thread, a certain percentage of fathers who have their children taken away from them deserve it because they are guilty of doing something concrete like abuse, abandonment, addiction, or infidelity. This of course ignores the fact that in the cases where the wife was the one who precipitated the divorce due to these same offenses the system will still punish the husband as if he were the one who committed the offense.

Commit a mugging? Go to prison.

Got mugged? Go to prison.

Later T explained that the rest of the fathers are guilty because there is no concrete wrongdoing to point to:

From what I’ve seen, if a person cannot think of something that they are doing wrong in their marriage and their marriage is going badly the problem is probably them.

This is where the debate nearly always ends up. Once cornered with facts and logic, the defenders of injustice resort to pure denial. No wife initiated divorce is ever frivolous, even when the wife claims she divorced frivolously. You simply can’t take a divorcée’s word for it when she tells you she divorced frivolously. You know how divorcées lie.

@Dalrock:In fact, even if you were to assume that only half or even one quarter of the men being punished by this system are innocent, this is a grave injustice.

Indeed. If the punishment were execution and/or women were the unfavored class we’d hear no end of it, even if only 2% of the innocent were being punished. Imagine if 25% of rapists not only went free, but were also given carte blanche sexual access to their victims enforced by the State.

Bob WallaceIn a divorce the children should automatically go to the father. This is what happened until the early 20th Century.

The “best interests of the child” doctrine probably is a product of the Progressive Era, and thus the idea likely was bubbling in the urban, upper middle class in the 1880’s to 1890’s. Note that this doctrine was replaced in the 1970’s by the “tender years” doctrine, which marginalizes fathers even more.

However, Bob Wallace, you are repeating a statement that has been made for years at places such as the Spearhead, A Voice For Men, and other sites within the …what is it again? Oh, yes, the “Lost Boys of the Manosphere”, that’s one of your pet names. So how is it that you, a staunch defender of women, come to agree with the Lost Boys? Could it be that the Lost Boys of the Manosphere actually know a thing, or even two, maybe something that you did not know, prior to your interactions with said Lost Boys? Have a care, lest you become a Lost Boy yourself.

One of the many commonalities between tradcons and feminists is a complete or near complete, inability to ever admit error. We can see this right now, on various sites, where feminists claim on the one hand that, why, of course everyone knows that there is a teensy, weensy bit of unbalance or even injustice in family court…and then on the other hand, boldly assert that it’s those dastardly MRA’s that have made impossible for anyone to do anything about it. Of course, it was the many, many righteously angry men who, in many ways and places, made it clear how ugly and tyrannical the anti-Family court actually is, and were feminists left to themselves they’d still be smugly asserting that men are just getting what they deserve. Rather than admit that feminism has promoted injustice, however, feminists will just pretend “Oh, we always knew (fact)”. Of course, to the external observer, this smoke screen looks identical to deliberately holding forth as “true” a claim that is clearly “false”; this is commonly called “lying” by the less nuanced, less sophisticated, righteously angry men. Being mere simple minded, Peter Pan, “lost boys”, intent on creating some sort of neo-Neanderthal “Lord of the Flies” civilization we never took the time to read all the various deep thinkers such as Andrea Dworkin, Susan McKinnon, Derrida, Foucalt, and other trash.
Silly men, we just call things by their right names – a lie is a “lie”, truth is “truth”.

And we, the “lost boys”, look at traditional conservatives, and find so many identical behaviors there that we see among the feministas. Tradcons bleat how different their words are, but we men prefer to look at actions as well. And so the question in time must arise:

Why is it that tradcons appear to adhere to the same standards for honesty and humility as feminists?

“So how is it that you, a staunch defender of women, come to agree with the Lost Boys”

I am not a staunch defender of women. Men created civilization, not women. Women are usually run by their feelings, not men. Without men there is no civilization and no technology. And to be blunt about it, it’s white men who have created about 98% of everything in history.

However, what it means to be a man has been discussed for about 3000 years. The Lost Boys of the Manosphere are overwhelmingly uneducated. They know nothing of the past. They know nothing of what the Bible says about men and women, or anyone else.

Because they are lost, they seek leaders to imitate. And what they imitate is nonsense – solipsism (which is narcissism), hamsters (rationalization) and the rest of that cultish babble.

When someone calls them on their BS, most can only call them Gammas, Omegas…more imitating bad ideas.

Feminism, which is leftist-lesbian evil, is based on the envy of men. Unfortunately, a lot of the Manosphere is based on the envy of women – otherwise it wouldn’t put them down so such.

Shorn of most of the obscenities and the feminism-specific language, this could have been written by any number of traditional conservatives. For example, this paragraph near the end has a certain resemblance to more than one tradcon critique of the righteously angry men:

The simple fact is, most men don’t beat, rape, or resent caring for their own children, and thus have no need for the kind of support and “activism” you specialize in. The “work” you do guarantees you’ll continue to attract entitled shitbags who hate women, while driving away decent people who thought you might have something interesting to say—right up until they realized what you’re really about.

With a bit of cleanup, that could be posted at any number of sites in the Orthosphere with no difficulty at all. Now, why is it that feminists at Jezebel and tradcons seem to be so similar, so often?

Bob WallaceI am not a staunch defender of women. Men created civilization, not women. Women are usually run by their feelings, not men. Without men there is no civilization and no technology. And to be blunt about it, it’s white men who have created about 98% of everything in history.

However, what it means to be a man has been discussed for about 3000 years. The Lost Boys of the Manosphere are overwhelmingly uneducated. They know nothing of the past. They know nothing of what the Bible says about men and women, or anyone else.

Of course this paragraph is nonsense. Any man who has taken the time to read androsphere texts with an open mind has encountered any number of discussions that invoke thinkers of the past, from Greece to India to China to Europe to North America. And as has been made abundantly clear to the careful reader, many men in the androphere, especially at this site, have been taught portions of the Bible from childhood – often a warped, false, woman-centric view of the Bible. And who is it that teaches men to submit to their wives, who is it that teaches men to put women upon a pedestal and worship them , eh?

Not the righteously angry men, whom you scoff at in your insular, ignorant, manner. No, it is the oh-so-traditional pastor who glosses over passages, and even entire books, rather than offend Woman, the Holy. It is the oh-so-traditional teacher who demands that boys act like girls.

Congratulations on learning about the “best interests of the child” doctrine, Bob. It’s good that you are picking up some facts here and there, from the men whom you scorn and denigrate. Try to not cherish your obvious ignorance quite so much, and you may learn more.

An aside: If you like history, you should read Simon Schama’s Citizens, a wonderful and very readable account of the first half of the French Revolution with terrific illustrations (Schama actually portrays Marie rather sympathetically).

OT:
A college history course I took talked about the quote. My professor said that volcanic eruptions in Iceland had made for famine in the Northern hemisphere in 1785-1788. France had more trouble than most countries did (drought, hailstorms during harvest). Food was scarce and expensive, the common man in Paris was starving.

King Louis XVI declared that bread was under price controls. Since the bread flour cost more than he allowed the bread to be sold at, bakers quickly ran out of bread and didn’t buy any more flour. Now there was no bread to be had, and more folks were starving.

The next proclamation was that if bread flour was unavailable, cake flour (a finer grind that cost more) was to be substituted. The bakers of Paris weren’t interested in paying to sell fine cake bread, and so that didn’t help. Since the king was known to be ruled by his wife, the quote was coined by revolutionaries and used to turn public opinion further against him.

Is this what really happened? I’m not really sure, lots of things I was taught in college weren’t so. It sounds plausible, though.

whenever i try to explain the contemporary state of relationships, which naturally shed light on women’s natural inclinations now that male-created codes of honor have been deconstructed, the nice, elder churchian ladies generally poo-poo* me and say “let them eat butthext lzozlzzozzoz”

Thinking, this need to be Happy, has been on my mind for the last while. This commentator from the post by Simcha Fisher (which I found by following your link to your March 8th post) nsums up a lot of what is percolating within me –

{Posted by Cynthia on Tuesday, Mar 6, 2012 10:50 AM (EDT):
Excellent post. Far too many people get caught up in this “I deserve to be happy” nonsense. Does God want us to be happy? Absolutely. However, there is no guarantee that we will have it in this lifetime. What I have found over the last couple of years is that there is a difference between happiness and joy. Happiness seems to be more on the surface and it isn’t as long lasting…more of an elusive thought actually. Joy is much deeper and longer lasting….and one can say they feel joy even in the midst of suffering. Not many would say, as they are watching a loved one suffer or living through the pain of a separation, that they are happy…but I bet many could say (those who truly understand the concept) that they feel joy in the midst of that suffering. Perhaps if more people model selflessness, the children today will grow up with a different understanding of happiness and divorce will become a little more rare.

da otehr day i was on a planez and i was trying to order some peeenutzzz peaaanutttez and teh stewwardesss i was ytrtying to get her number to play texty texty before sexty sexty gamesz lzozozozl but she couldn’t undertsand!!!!!

so i was getting frustrated and then thankfuly an old lady ineteeveened and said:

And I sayas, “No m;’azzmmzm I justs wannna ginasex her as da gbfdm don’t buttehxt nor tape it secerereteletuy like da neoetehstnat heoric teapers of buttehxt in sectreet lzozozozolzlzlz.”

And the old lady said, “ahaha i take it you’re not a sneoeoneoth sectriev taperz of buttehxt? all the betterz just don’t let her know as her butt ststinglozozozl won’t be set off i will get her numebersz so you gacan gina sex herz zlozozoz.”

And I says, “yah thanakz alothz and i want some PEEE NUTZ totot and then after that i wanna wants to put my own peanutz in her ginahole to sevree her gianat tingalzozozlozozz zzlzlzlzlzozozlzozozlzzo.”

So da nice old ladyzz turns 2 da stewardness nd says, “he would like some peanuts and your number.”

And that’s how I got the stewardneessed # as she undeetertsosozoodz!!!

{“Yet whenever this debate unfolds, there is a strong tendency of those arguing for justice to try to prove that the men being punished are innocent.”}

Sorta like the gun control debate going on in your part of the world right now. Those who want to ban weapons, are refering to the Second Amendment as if it is for sport shooting/hunters. Nice reframe. Actually the way I understand the Second Amendment, is that it was framed precisely to make sure that the citizens of America were armed well enough to fight invading forces, or their own government should it become corrupt.

You are right – in patriarchical societies (usually where unattached women were considerably poorer than men in general), in the event of a divorce, the kids would go to the father because the mother would realise that this would be in the best interests of said children.
It usually worked out well, EXCEPT where there was a wicked stepmother involved.

Then, although the child had access to education, material goods, etc, they were treated like dirt by the stepmother, usually with her favouring her own kids. In such situations, the kids suffered a lot…
Thankfully, divorce in these communities were always rare anyway…

But, recent studies show that wicked stepfathers pose a far greater threat to kids…with the high risk of sexual and physical abuse…

If both parties truly had the interests of their children at heart, divorce wouldn’t happen quite so often. Marital problems would be sorted out somehow.

– Once concerns Amelia Earheart, who lacked technical skills other cutting-edge aviators had but was still part of a fairly elite group. Even if Earheart was problematic, people who do this sort of exhibition work are a trivially small number.

-Another concerns a modest set of professional and semi-professional women who downshift during the course of their worklife. I knew one such woman who started out as a lawyer and ended up as a school librarian. Can you please explain how this constitutes a social problem?

– Your third complaint concerns the distortion and disfigurement of institutions such as the military by feminist attitudes.

-Your fourth is the assumptions about domestic life ‘T’ revealed in stages as she took one position and then another in the course of an argument.

The third and the fourth are legitimate complaints, but they are at best tangentially related and the force of the discussion is vitiated by including this other mess.

With regard to your second complaint, there is not much point in complaining that people change direction in life. A more serious complaint (but tangentially related to other concerns here, no more) would be the prevalence of manufactured pseudo-professions which are the issue of occupational certification boards, accrediting agencies, and the higher education apparat. Teaching and school administration as conceptualized by the purveyors of MEd degrees and public employee unions, social work, and library administration as conceived of by MLS programs would be examples of psuedo-professions. Much of the mental health trade is fairly dodgy as well.

Yes, men are getting screwed in the legal system but the following generation of women will pay the price for it. Because even if there are plenty of good women out there, more men will just automatically assume all women will divorce you and take you for all you got because the consequences are just too great.

“He had several “lady friends” who stayed the night at his house and he claimed they were “Just friends”. He frequently forgot important details about me, such as the fact that I had a sister, my birthday and what sorts of hobbies I had. He blew me off constantly, would return calls a week later with the excuse of “I was busy.” I often spoiled him with gifts, rides and sex only to receive a bag of Skittles in return. (I don’t even like skittles!) That was the only gift I ever received from him! I met a new friend and we were bonding over “worst ex-boyfriend stories” and suddenly we realized “boy, a lot of these sound the same… Was his name ____?” IT WAS THE SAME GUY!!!”

I will sum it up with a comment made by Silver Surfer to show the backlash which the next generation of women will be facing because of the current generation and previous generation of women’s tendencies to cash out on their husbands and take them for all they got.

Silver Surfer said…

Men aren’t getting married because more and more of us are realizing that there are NO benefits to it. Then there is the certainty that the woman will eventually divorce you, and with the help of the state, financially rape and enslave you. No benefits and all risk equals marriage strike.

I’m not trying to start a gun control debate by any means, but your understanding is correct, only switch your reasons. I think it is to out a corrupt government that is it’s primary reason for being.

“No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government”

— Thomas Jefferson, 1 Thomas Jefferson Papers, 334

People made much of the hunting argument through the 90’s as a reason to not ban guns and it worked in gun advocates favor. Unfortunately, the left is now running with this same meme in saying that is not what they are after.

That this Saturday you should write an essay taking as your text words attributed to Marie Antoinette and where you accuse (some) women of playing at being a man, particularily resonated with me, given an unfortunate experience I had last Monday, which resulted in my writing a letter on the Tuesday wherein I concluded with the following:

‘When attending a concert is more like an obstacle race, my attitude is, Why Bother: When your employees act like Marie-Antoinette, my view is that heads should roll!’

I had attended a certain concert hall, with a view to purchasing a ticket. Usually, ticket-sellers swing the computer screen around so that one may see a plan of the hall showing what tickets are available. On this occasion the female ticket-seller made no attempt to do so not withstanding my craning my body forward (which is not that easy as I suffer from sclerosis of the back), turning my head to the right. I never saw the screen, but was curtly told by the female (who sported a very visible tattoo on the inner arm and piercings through her lip and nostril) to move my body back. Out of politeness and somewhat shocked, I did so. Regaining my composure I enquired of her as to why she had so spoken to me and I was told that I was invading her personal space. As I subsequently wrote to The Managing Director of the Hall, I took the view that such gratuitous unpleasantness would be unlikely from a man and unlikely towards a woman and that such behaviour, increasingly common from young woman, is usually in inverse propertion to their personal merits and physical attractiveness. I added that far too many females seem unsuited to even the most straightforward jobs and who seem to feel justified in taking out whatever frustrations they may have on unsuspecting males who of course cannot respond as they might to do to a male. I rhetorically asked in my letter whether the Hall was being run for the benefit of the staff or whether they were in buisness for the purpose of providing a service to their potential patrons.

Nine-tenths of the unemployed in England are men, (work-shy, deadbeat-dads etc). This particular female seemed to be on some sort of power-trip with her invisible and unmarked personal space. Sadly such behaviour from the fair sex is far from uncommon – and veres from being uber-bitch (standing up to men!) to bursting into tears (you shouldn’t hurt me Im a girl).

Hm, it must be said, the story you tell (re the concert hall) is becoming more and more common. And yes, I agree with you that women like the one you describe usually have a massive chip on their shoulder, and they will stop at nothing to take it out on an innocent victim, usually a man.

@ An Observer,

What a helpful and civilised response to Pip’s question.
No insult, no (unnecessary and unprovoked) quip about her personal situation. You simply pointed her in the right direction.

It is indeed commenters like you that make me and other female commenters defend The Manosphere to those who knock it.

tweel, I do not know anything about a connection to Icelandic volcanoes, but it would not be a surprise, the world wide climate effects of the Krakatoa eruption are well known. There had been other crop failures in Europe, of course, the 18th century was not unique. It was the combination of multi year crop failure with a growing class dependent upon the state. The proliferation of “takers”, not limited only to the nobility, had outstripped the “makers” in the French economy, but this was not readily visible so long as harvests kept increasing. The unsupportability of the Royal French nobility, nacent middle class and clergy was only revealed in the economic crisis of the 1790’s.

Your observation regarding the bread flour vs. cake flour matches my recollection, and if memory serves it was Robespierre who took Marie Antoinette’s comment and bent it to his own ends. The French revolution of the 1790’s, like many human events, consists of a large collection of rogues, the power hungry, the power mad, the corrupt, etc. mixed in with a smaller number of the normal seeking to survive. Tragedy was all but assured from the start, it was a question of how much, and when, not if.

Too many people had become accustomed to privilege, so accustomed that they came to regard a privilege as a right.

T represents such a classic example of the modern female viewpoint such as what we might find on the feminist and mainstream media sites. Over there, she is just one of many. But here, she sticks out like a sore thumb because women like her seldom comment here for long as they mostly can’t take the heat in men’s kitchens. Kind of like the kid who sticks his fingers in his ears and goes “la la la la lalalalalala lala lalalala” when the adults are trying to talk sense to him. For those who don’t want to browse jezebel, ya don’t have to, you got your example right here, rest assured there are too many more like her.

Bob Wallace represents a classic tradcon who appears to share some common viewpoints with the manosphere but when scratched deep enough reveals a distinct lack of empathy simply because we’re not traditional enough, we don’t know enough of the old writers. Remember Bob’s church was one of many that never taught men how it really works with women, never taught men how to apply that old wisdom Bob cherishes so much to their relationships and why it’s so important to understand that going into a Christian marriage. If Bob contests that about his church, Dalrock has a long standing challenge to find churches and pastors who haven’t been feminized, who can and do preach red pill wisdom within the Christian and biblical context. Bob, if you disagree with this assessment of your church, you’re invited to respond to that one.

“open mind has encountered any number of discussions that invoke thinkers of the past, from Greece to India to China to Europe to North America. And as has been made abundantly clear to the careful reader, ”

A handful. On the other hand, there are the many hallucinations about hamsters, Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Omegas, Sigmas Deltas, female solipsism, hypergamy…that private language is a sign of a religious cult.

It is clear the overwhelmingly majority of men in the Manosphere have never learned to act like men. They are puzzled at their lack of success with women and their other failures in life. They seek mentors who will give them advice on how to make their lives work. They aren’t going to find it from Roissy, a nihilist who just happens to be a funny and entertaining writer.

Feminism is based on the envy of men. The Manosphere, while a needed corrective to the evils of leftist-lesbian feminism, is in many ways based on the envy of women, since the Lost Boys think women have ALL the power these day,

There are two ways to identify envy (the only one of the Seven Deadly Sins that isn’t any fun): the envious blame their problems on others, and they denigrate them.

Apply that to the Manosphere’s discussions about women and see what you come up with.

T represents such a classic example of the modern female viewpoint such as what we might find on the feminist and mainstream media sites.

Right. She is so consistently stereotypical of the dimwittery I find on feminist sites, that I remain suspicious that she’s actually a (probably female) Men’s Rights Activist, who has come here to playfully troll and construct a whipping girl caricature.

It is incredibly difficult for the average man to fathom how obtuse women can be, when he approaches it from a masculine perspective. T continues to do a wonderful job in illustrating exactly this, and for that, s/he is to be commended.

Another aspect of 18th century France was the bad habit the kings developed of raising short term cash by selling or licensing long term income streams. The notion of licenses granting monopolies of one sort or another was not new. The Spanish empire had used the licensio system to pay for its various needs for some centuries. What was not good for France was the use to which the raised cash was put.

Hypothetically, Louis XVI needs some more gold to remodel some part of Versailles. He determines that a toll road built by the state runs through the domain of the Compte du Boef, and proposes to the count that he, the count, buy the license to collect tolls on that road for an agreeable price, payable in gold coin. The Compte gets an income stream, the King gets ready cash. Then the Comptesse finds that there’s more money coming in, and why can’t the Chateaux du Boef be more up to date, it’s 250 years old and drafty and all the other Compte’s are keeping their Comptesse in better style, why can’t the Chateaux be more like Versailles?
So the Compte du Boef essentially subcontracts out toll collections to a local group, a syndicat headed by some bougeois merchants who agree to pay him some money up front and regular payments afterwards. Now the Chateaux gets fixed up, the local syndicat raises tolls in order to keep the Compte paid off and still make a profit. The Compte’s income stream just got smaller, too, although the Comptesse may not understand that little detail.

Cost to use the road goes up, money is spent on various rich men’s foibles, such as their edifice complex, in ways that don’t have any payoff in the future, and the King’s income is now a bit smaller than before. Do this enough times, and the King has to resort to ever more exotic ways to raise cash, such as borrowing.

A similar tale can be told of borrowing; money was borrowed not to improve harbors or the canal network, i.e. expenditures that would increase trade and thus defray cost or even turn a profit for the state, but to fund the various French Estates on an ongoing basis. The French government was in a sense eating its seed corn.

Good thing we’re all too smart for that silliness now, eh? Pass the cake…

I say this because you wrote:
“On the other hand, there are the many hallucinations about hamsters, Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Omegas, Sigmas Deltas, female solipsism, hypergamy…that private language is a sign of a religious cult.”
I do think the greek alphabet soup employed by PUAs is merely an exercise in narcissism, but hypergamy and female solipsism are definitely not part of a private language any more than terms coined in other contexts are.

I wrote:“open mind has encountered any number of discussions that invoke thinkers of the past, from Greece to India to China to Europe to North America. And as has been made abundantly clear to the careful reader, ”

Bob WallaceA handful.

Progress! Previously, Bob Wallace had claimed:

However, what it means to be a man has been discussed for about 3000 years. The Lost Boys of the Manosphere are overwhelmingly uneducated. They know nothing of the past. They know nothing of what the Bible says about men and women, or anyone else.

So in just one afternoon, Bob Wallace has moved from his strawman, his sweeping generalization of “they know nothing of the past” to a more cautions “handful”. Further reading with an open mind could yield still more learning. Who knows?

Bob WallaceOn the other hand, there are the many hallucinations about hamsters, Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Omegas, Sigmas Deltas, female solipsism, hypergamy…that private language is a sign of a religious cult.

Female solipsism is hardly an hallucination, and the same can be said for hypergamy. William Shakespeare wrote about both. So did Geoffry Chaucer; I commend “The Tale of the Wife of Bath” for a start. Neither dead, white, male used the exact terms, but both the self-centered nature of women, and their desire for the “best deal” in a man around, until a “better deal” comes along, can be found in their works. This supports certain Game concepts, by the way, as well as kicking out the “men and women are the same except women can have babies” notion that feminism – including conservative, traditional feminism – rests upon.

As for the terms of Game, they are symbols used to represent male states of being, as part of a larger effort to represent some aspects of human behavior. As has been observed by many men, Game works, it offers an ability to make predictions with some degree of accuracy. Modeling reality is not what cults do. Therefore, Bob Wallace’s little slur is not supported by reality, by the events that go on in the real world. He can engage in all the namecalling he wants, it won’t change a thing.

“he would see that it was the woman, not the man, who needed to be controlled more tightly. ”

How dumb can you people be? Men created civilization, not women. Men civilize women, not the other way around. It’s the “tradcons” who think women civilize men (the buffoon who popularized that nonsense was George Gilder) and I’m not one of them.

I know perfectly well uncontrolled women destroy society. And it’s men’s fault for listening to them out of a misguided sense of fairness,

As for being in favor of “Game,” I don’t insult or treat women badly. I also don’t take any nonsense off of it. I knew that when I was 12.

Apparently the most avid believers in the Manosphere don’t learn that until their 30s.

It dawns on me that this reframe…“Yet whenever this debate unfolds, there is a strong tendency of those arguing for justice to try to prove that the men being punished are innocent.”
is just a post marriage version of the same child support arguments. The other typical reframe“but it takes two to tango”
takes the discussion from what is effective for stabilizing marriage and discouraging fornication (specifically serial monogamy) to a discussion of who is at fault and who needs to be punished.

Refering to the Gilligan’s / Slut Island post:“You explain it to them slowly and carefully, and they nod at all the right moments indicating they understand. Then a feminist comes by and whispers “double standard” or “it takes two” in their ear, and the Gilligan instantly forgets everything you just explained to him.”

This “prove that the men being punished are innocent” does exactly the same thing. It turns a discussion away from actual outcomes and actual systematic injustice, into a hypothetical discussion of who is at possibly at fault and who should be punished more and who is most responsible.

Random Angeleno says:
January 12, 2013 at 4:38 pm
“T represents such a classic example of the modern female viewpoint such as what we might find on the feminist and mainstream media sites.”

Concerning T, I found this reading thru an old article of Dalrocks:

Treating her like a guy
Posted on March 7, 2012by Dalrock

“Legion says:
March 8, 2012 at 9:34 am
T says:
March 8, 2012 at 3:03 am
Early stages here, but I’m calling this one a White Knight. We’ll need more information to downgrade it to Mangina staus.
Do you think it will come back and keep repeating the same idiocy or will it shift what it says without responding to any one like a good troll.
Time will tell, but it bores me already.”
“slwerner says:
March 8, 2012 at 10:00 am
Legion – “Early stages here, but I’m calling this one a White Knight.”
I took it for slut who is offended by the negative attitudes shown towards sluts.
That “you’re a bunch of conservatives” attempt at shaming, and the suggestion that it sees itself as “progressive” (a.k.a. anti-social norms leftist) seems to point towards a sex-posi, gender-feminist in my estimation.
Maybe it would be willing to better identify itself for us? If it crawls out from underneath this bridge, to stand in the the illuminating light that shines here once again, that is, of course.”

Oh Bob,now you’ve morphed valid criticism into “insults.”
Usually that kind of entitlement mindset comes with a vagina.
Take note I’ve not descended to your level of baseless charges,but I’m sure someone will get around to it.

White knightery by any other name is still white knightery.
And it’s unfounded,so get off it.

On another website, a poster named Bob Wallace wrote that weight lifters were all homosexuals. This was in response to a website post encouraging men to lift weights to help them in their interaction with women.

Bob Wallace- “As for being in favor of Game, I don’t insult or treat women badly.”
——————————————————-

That is the money quote. This guy, Bob Wallace, doesn’t even understand what Game is. Even though explanations are all over the internet. Even though examples of Games’s success are all over the internet.

Bob Wallace is no friend of men. He wants young men today to remain in Tradcon/Christian confusion concerning the young women of today.

The manosphere are blue pill men that were getting the job done. We were given the red pill the hard way. These men have rerwitten through self discovery in the wee hours of the morning typing to each other on the internet exchanging ideas through thoughts and reasons of personal observations. The old greats can’t touch us in greatness. I put Dalrock on the same plain as any great writer you can come up with. The power of Dalrock is is lack of arrogance. The man learns from his commenters. He allows free thought and conversation with guidance and these uneducated men teach the man. From the spearhead to heartsite from the PUA sites to the american women suck sites the manosphere is teaching the west how to survive itself.
For those of you stupid that don’t get it the cell phone has liberated the view of evil for all. The red pill for a man is much better than a blue pill man with no hope. See video of arab spring the latest is Syria. (rifle bullets do some amazing things to peoples heads including children.)
Bob Wallace
You are on the wrong side of history on this. We are going to change the world and you will be one that it was done in spite of.

Opus: “given an unfortunate experience I had last Monday, which resulted in my writing a letter”

This is like coming home, finding that your dog has crapped on the carpet, and punishing it. It doesn’t work because of the time lag – the dog has forgotten that it crapped on the carpet, and doesn’t understand why you are punishing it. In fact, the dog will connect the punishment not with the carpet mess, but with whatever it was doing immediately prior to the punishment.

You should have asked to speak with the manager right then and there. When a feminist craps on the carpet, it needs to be called out in a calm, firm and polite manner, but still called out.

Bob – how can you write a blog where you have ZERO comments? For EVERY post. Are you that dull? Get a clue smart guy, you are about as enlightening as Matthew King. Maybe you guys should go bowling together…

“As an analogy, imagine a criminal court system where there was virtually no chance of being acquitted if you were part of a specific unfavored class, no matter how strong your case is. If you offer unfavored defendants in this scenario the chance to plead guilty to receive a lower sentence, they will nearly always take it because they have nothing to gain by trying to make their case for innocence. Yet you couldn’t take a 90% (unfavored class) guilty plea end result as proof that a system is fair which finds the unfavored class guilty 99% of the time cases go to trial. They are simply two sides of the same injustice.”

“How, do tell, is “playing career woman” as a never-married, childfree woman (in my case, a DVM with her own practice) causing an “immense cost to our economy”?”

[D: Not all career women are playing. Those who are playing cause immense cost.]

Notice how that had to be explained to a “never-married, child free woman (in [her] case, a DVM with her own practice) and how it immediately becomes personal despite being entirely non-applicable. The borg have spoken.

What a helpful and civilised response to Pip’s question.
No insult, no (unnecessary and unprovoked) quip about her personal situation. You simply pointed her in the right direction.

It is indeed commenters like you that make me and other female commenters defend The Manosphere to those who knock it.”

Of course, because the manosphere (a place where red pill men have COLLECTIVELY created a space for themselves to counter the FORCED requirement to accommodate team vagina and all its demands in EVERY other aspect of male life), should accommodate team vagina and all its demands with regard to how women will be treated in order to garner that coveted “female approval” accreditation. Piss off lady. If those are the terms for defending what you know to be right, then goodriddens to ya.

“It is clear the overwhelmingly majority of men in the Manosphere have never learned to act like men. They are puzzled at their lack of success with women and their other failures in life. They seek mentors who will give them advice on how to make their lives work. They aren’t going to find it from Roissy, a nihilist who just happens to be a funny and entertaining writer.”

And they know they’ll never get any leadership or mentoring from a “real” man like you. You talk a nice little put down while providing ZERO leadership to the lost boys in your own right. From where I come from, talk like yours is called hypocrisy. Hope that word doesn’t come across to culty to you.

It’s a better alternative. Don’t worry about moralizing people that would judge you and judge what’s wrong with men today. Just take care of yourself and the best way to do that is to learn strategies that allow you to avoid marriage because you have better alternatives.

Here is a New York Times article about “The End of Traditional Dating” and how some young women are getting frustrated that hookup culture didn’t end with college and is the dominant form of social interaction with whole bunch of attempts to reason why. Duh?

See, I agree with this study and I have read the original work. My ex-wife filed for divorce right when her salary, coupled with my child support crossed the $100K barrier and found that all too convenient and often thought and said “Would she have divorced if she would have lost the house, access to the children, and a month hit of a few thousand dollars?” Probably not. There is too much incentive for women to walk. Shit I would have divorced her if the shoe would have been on the other foot. I hated her. And when she traveled for work, I used to daydream that the plan would wreck and I would get it all and a bunch of insurance. I would watch the clock and know that in a few minutes she would be back and make my life a hell again. She had no checks on her behavior and knew she could act in any manner she chose between she held the legal advantage.

Learn game, man. Never marry. I had a nice day today. I slept until noon, I fiddled around on the internet, went to the Texas Roadhouse and picked some steak, red meat, man food, watched the Ravens and the Broncos. And no one messed with me. No one insulted me. No one imposed on me, stressed me out, hassled me. I couldn’t have said the same thing if I had a wife.

Here’s another link. Amy Cuddy offers up a thesis with startling implications: even the simplest act, repeated over time, can profoundly shape our destiny.

After citing evidence from her own research that two minutes of standing in a more powerful position alters our brain and body chemistry, helping us become more assertive, confident, and passionate, Dr. Cuddy goes on to describe how she, herself, overcame the debilitating neurological effects of a devastating auto accident by faking confidence until she actually became confident. She stands before us, transformed from the diffident, traumatized young woman she once was, into a vibrant, compelling leader in her field — living proof that how we behave shapes not just our feelings, but who we are.

It’s a 21 minute from Dr Cuddy’s talk at TED.

I got the link from the reddit seduction forum. Not all the links and articles on the site are the work of the devil and many have everyday advice for situations other than pick up. One of the essays talked about this panic a guy felt at the end of a date with the awkward moment of “the kiss” and a commentor told him what to do. I am sure we have all felt that moment.

BC – “This is like coming home, finding that your dog has crapped on the carpet, and punishing it. It doesn’t work because of the time lag – the dog has forgotten that it crapped on the carpet, and doesn’t understand why you are punishing it.”

A woman I once dated decided to break up with me. It was a memorable production, not some quickie phone call or something A day or two later, she changed her mind. Several months later, I mentioned that to her – it was relevant to the conversation – and she got this strange look on her face, and her body language changed. She said she never did that. Except for her barely noticeable vaguely stammering tone as she answered, I honestly could not tell if she was lying or had really forgotten.

I merely admired the way someone responded to another commenter.
Pip’s mention of her job and personal status was relevant to the question she asked Dalrock.
(By the way, Dalrock’s response to her was also excellent – forgot to mention that before).
I admired An Observer’s resistance to the temptation of using that information to ridicule her.

As to your other comment about stepfathers, it wasn’t really an accusation against men. I was using that as a reminder as to the risk posed to children when (both) their parents separate.
FYI, Dalrock himself has mentioned this risk before when he talked about single mothers and their exposing of their kids to risk by ‘dating’ multiple strange men.
But you asked for evidence from me. So here is one, page 4, line 3-6.http://www.psc.isr.umich.edu/pubs/pdf/rr01-471.pdf

Of course, there are others…
There are also studies showing the risk women pose to children, sometimes their own.
Happy to provide those too, if you insist.

This thread is not about me, but I trust I may be permitted to respond to BC and his perfectly sensible suggestion that I speak to the manager of the Hall, there and then. In fact, I did just that, and was attended by two perfectly soberly dressed, ushers – one male, one female. They listened politely but seemed helpless; they did nothing. The Manager of the Hall, himself, would, I have no doubt, not have been in attendance, and there would have been no one of higher authority than the ushers.

I am also indebted to Spacetraveller for her kind remarks – so much so I almost feel almost guilty for what I wrote. I may add therefore that having left the hall and gone for a walk I decided to have dinner in a very ancient public house – there having been a public house on the site since the thirteenth century, and once frequented by Samuel Pepys and Dr Johnson, and probably William Shakespeare himself, as it was next door to his old theatre. I was therefore rather conscious of the fact that I was served both at the bar and at table by a charming good looking blonde woman who I took to be Scandinavian, who twice – on passing my table – and with a smile asked if everything I was eating was fine – as indeed it was. The woman in The Hall was I regret to say a typical anglo-bitch.

A woman I once dated decided to break up with me. It was a memorable production, not some quickie phone call or something A day or two later, she changed her mind. Several months later, I mentioned that to her – it was relevant to the conversation – and she got this strange look on her face, and her body language changed. She said she never did that. Except for her barely noticeable vaguely stammering tone as she answered, I honestly could not tell if she was lying or had really forgotten.

Nightskyradio
Women remember the way your hair was styled the day you met or how your eyes looked etc. That break up thing was an emotional event. She was lieing.

Dear Art Deco, Many people see the massive divorce rates, rise in abortions, broken families, troubled children, and the decline of culture and civility as progress. Dalrock does not see all this as progress. You do. Perhaps there are other blogs better suited to your inherent callings and nature?

Mr. Great Books, I am usually active on orthodox Catholic boards (as is DarwinCatholic, who is treated unfairly here on occasion). I am a fairly standard-issue participant and regard none of the social ills you mention with equanimity. Nothing I have said here would indicate that I do.

It is clear the overwhelmingly majority of men in the Manosphere have never learned to act like men. They are puzzled at their lack of success with women and their other failures in life. They seek mentors who will give them advice on how to make their lives work. They aren’t going to find it from Roissy, a nihilist who just happens to be a funny and entertaining writer.

Mr. Bob Wallace, I realize you have been subject to an avalanche of puerile insults here and on other occasions. However, it is simply unwarranted to make those sort of judgments about individuals you have no acquaintanceship with, no matter how many volumes of the Norton Classics Library you have read.

The classics again? I picture the ghost of lit. class past dragging chains on which piles of books are attached.
I like the bowling suggestion, that is a perfect curative, immersion school that will have them lining up for the release of the SI Swimsuit issue while just elsewhere in the store an original GBFM is being auctioned off.

Dalrocks post is another on of those that form the corpus of issue summaries and debate tomfoolery that motivates the sphere in the first place.

An example of the thinking Dalrock indicates in this post:

Last evening with some people out at dinner, some wine involved, I decided to playfully speak to some of these things, namely sexual denial, and frivolous divorce. I saw the opportunity as a recent divorce was described where the husband actually did leave his wife for another women, and the table talk was all about how beautiful the wife was and how mediocre the new woman (we were gossiping, the people in the topic were not there). I decided to ask the people at the table why they think a man might leave a woman for a less attractive woman.

the answers were textbook:

She is smart
She shares a hobby
she has great talks with him
etc etc. there were several iterations of this

But the very best one, made with such sincerity…..was……-because of her heart-

I let that run for awhile as they all seemed to be brainstorming and finding the common responses, enthusiastically pontificating about the reasons and eager to share their human insights before I said, nah, those things may or may not be present but there is one thing that drove it and its universal and its very very simple….think some more…..one thing very basic….

They hem and haw and repeat variations of the above and not a single person managed to guess.
I said simple, she was willing to have enthusiastic sex with the man, and make the man feel like she really wants to have sex with HIM.
It was three seconds before a woman said “well, then he is shallow”…touch of anger in the voice, “if that’s all he wants he is shallow”

Really, but where did I say that’s ALL he wants? I explained to them to see how that woman had added the word all to create the straw man? It was not done argumentatively so the evening wasn’t spoiled by argument, and I think the guys were quietly agreeing as they didnt chime in. I will wait for their post postmortems
We didn’t get much further but did talk about frivolous divorce a little and I had to sort of drop that one lest it would have ruined the evening, as it was we occupied a table for a very long time.

I havent shared anything others havent experienced in one form or another, yet it is always profound when you witness it in real time. I didnt know that this Italian restaurant allowed rodents to be brought in…..maybe there was a hamster dish on the menu.

“The old greats can’t touch us in greatness. I put Dalrock on the same plain as any great writer you can come up with. The power of Dalrock is is lack of arrogance. The man learns from his commenters. He allows free thought and conversation with guidance and these uneducated men teach the man.’

(begins slow clapping)

There is no doubt Dalrock is indeed one of the Great minds of our time.
I’ve read the Norton classics and they’ve got nothing on the discussions that happen here.

If there wasn’t a Bob Wallace there would be a need to invent one.

Talk about cognitive dissonance in the perpetuation of servitude to the feminine imperative.
(The elephant in the room)

– Once concerns Amelia Earheart, who lacked technical skills other cutting-edge aviators had but was still part of a fairly elite group. Even if Earheart was problematic, people who do this sort of exhibition work are a trivially small number.

Part of why the attribution of the quote stuck so well was it fit with Marie Antoinette’s history of “playing peasant”. Dressing up in costume and pretending you are someone else is generally very disrespectful and shows a lack of empathy. This is especially true if they face hardships you can’t even begin to imagine. There is a line here however, and it has to do with the way you approach it. This is why I made such a point to distinguish between the women who approach male roles with the seriousness men do, and the women who are merely “playing” men. Unfortunately feminists are in general far more interested in playing men than approaching male roles with seriousness. I explain this in detail in the links I provided for context, but if you are confused perhaps others are, so I’ll offer more detail on Amelia Earhart (AE).

AE won her nicknames Lady Lindbergh, and Queen of the Air by riding in the closed cabin of a plane on a flight which by then had become fairly pedestrian. As she herself points out, she didn’t do anything other than sit there while a man flew her across the Atlantic:

I was just baggage, like a sack of potatoes.

For this she received a ticker tape parade and went to the White House to meet the president.

Fast forward five years, and AE finally solos across the Atlantic, but there is nothing groundbreaking about her doing this other than the genitalia of the pilot. Nothing new needed to be figured out or designed, because this is a run which by then was fairly common, and aircraft technology had been improving incredibly fast during this basic time period.

Later Purdue bought her a twin engine airliner (Lockheed Electra) to fly around the world:
However, she was so inexperienced when she set out to achieve this that on her first attempt she crashed before she was able to take off. She wasn’t even qualified to taxi the plane on the ground, yet she thought she was qualified to fly around the world. See! I’m just like the men! Contrast her with Hanna Reitsch whom a commenter describes here and you will see the difference between taking a male role seriously and “playing men”.

I make this same distinction clear in the link for Playing Career Woman, and while it may be a bit more subtle the distinction is there for playing warrior. The opening link in the playing warrior post is to an article about a female marine who did what it took to hang with the men on the battlefield and the stress on her body was so intense it left her infertile. Her example was what helped me better understand the contrast between women who really want to do the work required to get the respect (manly pride), and the women who typically follow and set out to stamp out manly pride.

@GT66;You talk a nice little put down while providing ZERO leadership to the lost boys in your own right. From where I come from, talk like yours is called hypocrisy.

I’m not going to defend Bob Wallace, but I am going to defend the term “hypocrisy” from corruption. Criticizing X while not providing an alternative to X isn’t hypocrisy. In fact the whole notion that in order for criticism to be valid one must provide an alternative is perniciously wrong. If a doctor says you have cancer and you claim that he must be wrong because he doesn’t provide a cure, impending death disagrees with the counter-diagnosis of hypocrisy.

Hypocrisy is when someone acts in a manner inconsistent with his stated principles. Criticism of trying to learn manliness from pickup artists is either valid or invalid on its own merits as criticism. Griping that alternatives aren’t presented does not invalidate criticism, in general, and it certainly isn’t hypocrisy.

I have just re read Dalrock’s essay linked above at ‘playing warrior’ where he suggests that women often set out with the best intentions to emulate men and thus experience ‘manly pride’ but once let in begin to mark off territory so as to keep men out. I can think of many examples, but even before re-reading the ‘playing warrior’ essay it had occured to me that that was exactly what my Concert Hall experience was really about. If a woman is sitting down, and a man is standing, and thus appearing to tower over her – her reptilian hind-brain will experience this as a threat, for after all I am not her man. In other words in dealings as between men and women it is (I suggest) very difficult for women – if you are not her man – to be seen as other than an intruder, and I suspect that most of the sexual harrassement allegations derive from this very paradigm – women mistaking ordinary interactions for a move to possess. Certainly the ‘marking out territory’ to which Dalrock refers in his ‘playing warrior’ essay seems to have been exactly what the young ticket-seller with her imaginary and un-marked territory was doing. She had ceased to be an effective ticket-seller and was playing at being one and like Marie Antoinette playing peasant, under conditions of her own devising.

People were fascinated with Amelia Earhart and she and her husband promoter took advantage of that to some degree. Yes, she received a ticker tape parade. The people who threw the ticker tape did not have to be manipulated by a feminist agitprop machine into so doing. There was no feminist agitprop machine at the time.

Long-distance flying on turbo-props was absolutely not pedestrian and much of what she did required remarkable aplomb and courage that most of us do not have opportunity to demonstrate. Only a tiny minority of people have the skills to undertake long-distance flying in our own time, much less in 1932. My grandfather was not flying planes in 1932, even though his uncle owned a commuter airline. Yes, if you watch a rerun of American Experience, you will be treated to a contemporary of Amelia Earhart trashing her technical skills. The thing is, that woman was a member of the 99s and a peer of Earhart’s, one who did not get the attention that Earhart did. Jealousy is not very attractive, even among the very capable. You can argue that Earhart was over-rated and that she received a degree of public attention and sponsorship that should have gone to someone else. Blame the sponsors, blame the people who paid money to attend her public lectures, blame the newspaper reporters, blame Pres. Hoover if you think they were wasting their time and resources. It makes little sense to say her public career in the years running from 1928 to 1937 was some sort of pantomime. It was not.

You again took my comments out of context and deleted relevant portions to claim that I made an argument that is entirely different than the one that I actually made. You did an excellent job with the straw man and it was a cute post that made for an entertaining read, but I doubt that anyone who read the initial comments will take this seriously. If you ever want to address my actual argument let me know.

Excellent article, but there is a problem with your analogy. “Let them ask for custody” is not analogous to “Let them eat cake” since the cake eaters would actually be rec eiving something to eat and the fathers would only be permitted to ask for custody. The more correct analogy would be “let them have visitation” which would indicate that they are actually getting some time with their children. This, of course, is exactly what we do. By offering visitation, we can rationalize the practice of giving mothers custody because visitation still allows fathers to be involved while ignoring its inadequacy. Your second analogy, “let them pay child support” is a good one because it allows us to substitute money for “care.” Taken together “Let them have visitation” and let them pay child support” are the perfect replacements for “let them eat cake” since the “cake” she referred to was dense bread made mostly from chafe and not sufficient for proper nutrition.

follow the money
What you must understand
is that the feminist movement
is a multi-billion-dollar business
run by the bankers
When women play career women
and fall short
the bankers’ lawers
can then transfer money from men
to women
as they label
women’s natural shortcomings
an injustice that is the fault of
men.
Feminism allows the central bankers
to destroy the family
Both a central bank
and the abolition of the family
are planks in the communist’s crusade
Feminism allows the bankers
to remove the father from the home
by playing to the woman’s natural
butt and gina tingzzloozzoozoz
and callingupon her
to become empowered
by serving her butt and gina tingzzlooooz
over god faith family
and children.
Feminism allows the fiat bankers
to dumb down the kids
and drug them up
to deocnstructthe GReat Books for Men
to replace Moses and Jesus–eternity’s case studies
with divorce lawyers
who buy and sell the law
as the debauch God’s Natural Law.
Feminism transfers billions to the banker/lawyer/state
via divocre and sexual harrasment lawsuits
as they butthext the womenin college
and secrtly tape the deosuling
converting women into mere vehicles of welath transfer
and then send them forth
to tempt and take
to transfer asstes from men
to the bankerz
as the ankerz promise them
unlimited butthexting to their delight
should they only cast off truth and honor
and let their black hole butthole
serve the banker’s night
as they train pussified men to beomce white knights
protecting a deosuled, bernankifed woman’s honor
when all her honor, has long been a gonor.

I heard an interesting thing on Swedish radio today. Kenya is introducing automatic marriage for “come we stay” relations after 6 months.

“… Chairperson of the group Nderitu Njoka said the Bill was marginalising men, adding that it was wrong to force people to get married just because they have been living together.

He said it was a constitutional right for individuals to stay in ‘come-we-stay’ unions and the law must not be used to force people into marriage when they are not ready.

“Marriage is done willingly by two people and no law should force anyone to get married,” said Njoka.

He, however, supported the proposition to abolish dowry, saying that none of the parties to a marriage is more special than the other.

“We support the Matrimonial Property Bill, which provides for couples to acquire property separately,” added Njoka.

He said some people got into marriage so as to accrue a right to their partners’ property, saying that men are especially vulnerable. Njoka said those in these unions are grown-ups who know what they are getting into when they live together. …”

The Kenyan MRA is interviewed her along with some women who see no problems with the Bill.

Wow! Nothing illegal in making a man, through deceit, pay for your lifestyle and that of your children’s with his own money and life, defrauding him not only of his own ability to have children but also that of his dignity and humanity? That’s slavery, fraud and misrepresentation to name just a few crimes.

Wow! Nothing illegal in making a man, through deceit, pay for your lifestyle and that of your children’s with his own money and life, defrauding him not only of his own ability to have children but also that of his dignity and humanity? That’s slavery, fraud and misrepresentation to name just a few crimes.

It’s fraud, but not criminal fraud. There isn’t a specific criminal statute about it (nor will there be one anytime soon). The problem with the fraud case is that it could be argued by the woman’s lawyer that it was fraud without a harm, so to speak, because even though he wasn’t the biological father, he was the de facto father and had an established relationship with the kids, which he said he enjoyed. I can see many courts deciding that this kind of thing is not the kind of thing that is worth awarding damages for because of the long-established de facto relationship with the kids — and quite a few people outside the manosphere would also take issue with a guy digging into paternity issues relating to kids that he has been the de facto father of since birth for 20 years due to the disruption to everyone’s lives brought about by that. This is why I think the answer to paternity fraud/cuckolding is testing at or shortly after birth, before a real de facto father relationship is well established and bilateral with the kid(s), rather than things like that that basically mess with the lives of numerous people — yes that was occasioned by the cuckolding to begin with, for sure, but sometimes it really is better to not make a bad situation worse, and I would argue that after you have been the father of the kids to yourself and them for 20 years since birth, you probably ought to not bother at that stage with a paternity test because they are de facto your kids.

@feminist hater – it seems like it would be hard to prove that he didn’t know or suspect the entire time or that she knew that the kids weren’t his. Being slutty will probably never be a crime no matter what damage it causes others. It’s a shame that “his” kids won’t speak to him. You’d think that they would be able to have a relationship despite the mother’s deceit.

I know a man that experienced something similar, only his wife had him have a vasectomy shortly after the child was born. He ended up broke, went to prison for a horrible crime that he didn’t commit (she arranged that) and childless. His reputation was ruined as well. The only silver lining is that he manage to get his conviction overturned and move on. The wife was guilty of several crimes, but none could be proven so they didn’t prosecute her.

There are a lot of resources in these areas which the wealthy (who are really an internationalist group — full of people who hold multiple citizenships and who think patriotism or class consciousness is quaint or dangerous) are eager to get their hands on. It almost looks like radicalizing women is a way to weaken traditional cultures, so that they can be fully exploited by outsiders.

Now I’m starting to sound like a Marxist, or GBFM, but I wonder about this stuff. Perhaps feminism is merely a ploy by people to dissolve a society before it’s digested by corporate interests.

Incidentally, I know several Kenyan and Tanzanian women who have immigrated into my area recently. To the last one they seem slim, cute, intelligent, modest and sane. Just being in their general proximity is an excellent case study in everything that makes North American chicks the sex-addled, antidepressant-dependant, dishonest, churlish, whorish screwballs we all enjoy.

It’s a form of Paternity Fraud. This was twenty years of a man’s life that he will never get back and he will never have the chance to further his own seed. That is inhumane and an extraordinary harm to be committed on a man. The children were lied to by their mother, not their non-biological father.

You cannot make a situation like this worse because the mother took the most inhumane action possible for both children and husband right from the get go, in order to further her own needs and not take responsibility for her own actions. Actions like this need to be dealt with properly, else you only incur more damage to children in the long run. Much like the divorce problem we talk about on this blog.

Just because it doesn’t fall under a ‘criminal offense’, it is about as damaging as any ‘Fraud Crime’ can get and the only reason it isn’t a crime in Western Nations is to protect women.

My own opinion. If Paternity Fraud isn’t a crime, no Fraud is a criminal offense.

T, she is a slut but that’s not the issue here. She willfully misrepresented the children as his and she knew they were not. She willfully spent his money for 20 years on herself and her children knowing they were not his. That is Financial Fraud. Which is an actual Criminal Offense.

Hey all. Long time lurker, first time poster. While I’m not really pro MRA/Game, I’m rather disaffected from feminists as well (class consciousness can gtfo), and I’ve been watching this whole ‘feminine imperative’ thing with great interest.

However, after seeing what everyone else says, here and on other blogs, I wonder if maybe we’re overthinking it a little.

Reducing it to its simplest form, conditional love means that it allows for the possibility of rejection, either now or in the future. Therefore, to desire unconditional love is a reaction to the fear of rejection.

Now, you might say “Sure, but all these other details are important, men and women are biologically different and that needs to be dealt with,” but I do believe that while humans can do this without any outside help, religion and society fuels the whole Madonna/Whore complex, at least in the sense that we create a hyperidealized idea in our heart and measure real human women against it.

So, I wonder if the fear/demonization of female rejection in the manosphere has a bit of that at the heart of it. Some of you are catholics, after all.

So I guess the question is…is there really a way to be conditionally loving, which is both inevitable and perhaps even necessary, while at the same time not being a bad christian?

People were fascinated with Amelia Earhart and she and her husband promoter took advantage of that to some degree. Yes, she received a ticker tape parade. The people who threw the ticker tape did not have to be manipulated by a feminist agitprop machine into so doing. There was no feminist agitprop machine at the time.

Of course it was feminist agitprop. She rode, as a passenger, in a plane a man flew across the North Atlantic. Yes, she was the first woman to allow a man to fly her across the North Atlantic, but this was in a closed cabin plane and was a much shorter route than Lindbergh flew to win the prize. Lindbergh flew a plane he custom designed. Earhart rode as a passenger in a Fokker Tri Motor. The flight was only noteworthy because someone on board the plane didn’t have a penis. From the wiki page on the actual pilot:

Stultz was the pilot of the Fokker Trimotor “Freindship” on June 18, 1928 when Amelia Earhart became the first woman passenger to cross the Atlantic Ocean.

This is what she received a ticker tape parade and met the president for. The whole thing was a publicity stunt, designed to allow women to say “me too!” after Lindbergh. From EA’s Wiki page:

After Charles Lindbergh’s solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927, Amy Phipps Guest, (1873–1959), expressed interest in being the first woman to fly (or be flown) across the Atlantic Ocean. After deciding the trip was too perilous for her to undertake, she offered to sponsor the project, suggesting they find “another girl with the right image.” While at work one afternoon in April 1928, Earhart got a phone call from Capt. Hilton H. Railey, who asked her, “Would you like to fly the Atlantic?”

And by fly the Atlantic, she means the way nearly all of us have “flown the Atlantic”, as a passenger (from the EA wiki page):

Since most of the flight was on “instruments” and Earhart had no training for this type of flying, she did not pilot the aircraft. When interviewed after landing, she said, “Stultz did all the flying—had to. I was just baggage, like a sack of potatoes.” She added, “…maybe someday I’ll try it alone.”[49]

For this she was made a hero. The whole thing was a publicity stunt:

When the Stultz, Gordon and Earhart flight crew returned to the United States, they were greeted with a ticker-tape parade in New York followed by a reception with President Calvin Coolidge at the White House.

Trading on her physical resemblance to Lindbergh,[52] whom the press had dubbed “Lucky Lindy,” some newspapers and magazines began referring to Earhart as “Lady Lindy.”[53][N 5] The United Press was more grandiloquent; to them, Earhart was the reigning “Queen of the Air.”[54] Immediately after her return to the United States, she undertook an exhausting lecture tour (1928–1929). Meanwhile, Putnam had undertaken to heavily promote her in a campaign including publishing a book she authored, a series of new lecture tours and using pictures of her in mass market endorsements for products including luggage, Lucky Strike cigarettes (this caused image problems for her, with McCall’s magazine retracting an offer)[55] and women’s clothing and sportswear.

Before all of this, she was only noteworthy for being the 16th woman to receive a pilot’s license and having broken the women’s altitude record by flying 14,000 feet, almost half as high as the existing (male) altitude record for the day (34,508 ft). But because of all of the manufactured publicity around her “matching” Lindbergh by riding as a passenger on a shorter flight, she was handed anything she wanted to prove that “women can do that too”. Unfortunately, she didn’t do the fundamental work needed to even be qualified to taxi her plane before deciding she would fly it around the world (she couldn’t use the navigation or communication equipment either, so she brought a man along). From the link I provided above:

THE REAL FORD ISLAND CRASH

Simply but sadly put, Amelia Earhart ground-looped her Lockheed Electra on take-off. To begin her departure, she had taxied her aircraft to the Northeast end of the island (the nearest end to the current bridge). After lining up with the runway, she revved the engines on the powerful Electra. The aircraft started veering to the right. Earhart adjusted he throttles to correct the drift, but she overcorrected. It had rained heavily the night before, and the field was slick.

The plane spun left into a full ground loop. All of the aircraft’s weight was put on the right landing gear as the left wing lifted the left landing gear off the runway. The combined weight of the heavily packed Electra and its three crew members was too much. The right landing gear collapsed. The Electra spun on the ground in the shower of sparks shown in the movie. The aircraft was salvageable, but not quickly. Amelia Earhart could not go on to her next landing, tiny Howland Island. She left that afternoon on the Steamship Malolo to return to California and plan her next attempt.

@ feminist hater – I said that being a slut won’t ever be a crime, because it would be the defense that a woman would use if someone actually tried to prosecute her for this. Fraud has to be intentional. If she claimed that she cheated on her husband, but thought that the child was his, then it would be hard to prove otherwise. There is no way to prove that she knew he wasn’t the father.

Wow T, did you read the article? She actually committed adultery too. How’s this for ‘Intentional’? She willfully committed adultery on her husband two years into their marriage and then had a child that wasn’t his and didn’t tell him. She then committed adultery again and had another child and didn’t tell him about that affair either.

BUT NOOOOOOOO! She couldn’t have possibly known the children weren’t his…

As this thread now seems to be partially concerned with a woman whose reputation is greater than her merits deserve, it put me in my mind of another woman, the composer Ethyl Smyth (1858-1944) the first probably really good female composer, not that I have ever heard a note of her music, which must say something, but, she, a composer of six Operas, and no less than two volumes of autobiography, evinces ‘male chauvinism’ as hindering her in career. I beg to differ. Each of her six Operas were played at major Opera Houses in her lifetime; a remarkable feat especially as I doubt that any were commissioned. Compare her then with her near contemporary Frederick Delius (1862-1934) who by chance also wrote six Operas (probably also all uncommisioned) yet despite his enormous (and continuing) popularity only three were done in his lifetime. I am going to suggest that what Dame Ethyl calls chauvinism, is in fact yet another instance of the pussy-pass in operation for no man when asked as to why his Opera has not been staged can say that it was because he has a penis, (yet non-performance is the fate for almost all uncommisioned operas). Dame Ethyl however alleges her pussy hindered her, when it is clear the very opposite must be true.

I am thus reminded of what Steve Moxon writes in his book The Woman Racket, where he mentions that he was at one time the entrepeneur behind London’s premier accoustic venue for singer-songwriters, and that any aspiring woman had merely to turn up to be booked whereas males had to demonstrate exceptional ability.

Dame Ethyl is now merely a footnote in history, yet Clara Wieck (some of whose music I have heard) – seemingly a less impressive female composer – is always being touted by the feminists. I would suggest that the reason for the rise of Clara and the fall of Ethyl, has little to do with the music, more that, unlike Clara, spinster Ethyl failed to marry a top-male composer (Robert Schumann) and (allegedly) take as a lover another (Johann Brahms- some fifteen years younger than her too!) – in other words behind their rhetoric even feminists rate women more when there is a man to be latched onto – but then claim male oppression for limited output as they imply re Clara.

Zippy says:
“@GT66;
You talk a nice little put down while providing ZERO leadership to the lost boys in your own right. From where I come from, talk like yours is called hypocrisy.

Hypocrisy is when someone acts in a manner inconsistent with his stated principles. Criticism of trying to learn manliness from pickup artists is either valid or invalid on its own merits as criticism. Griping that alternatives aren’t presented does not invalidate criticism, in general, and it certainly isn’t hypocrisy.”

His put downs of males not conforming to HIS standard while also providing no meaningful demonstration of how to attain such a standard is IMO hypocrisy. I never claimed to be a master linguist so pick another word for this if you think there is one that is a better fit. Either way, Wallace and his holier-than-thou male shaming ilk are worse than the feminists. Clowns like Wallace only seem to be here to land a couple sucker punches during the melee.

You again took my comments out of context and deleted relevant portions to claim that I made an argument that is entirely different than the one that I actually made. You did an excellent job with the straw man and it was a cute post that made for an entertaining read, but I doubt that anyone who read the initial comments will take this seriously. If you ever want to address my actual argument let me know.

Feel free to restate the case you feel I misrepresented. Please, explain why the system is fair. This should be very easy if I in fact knocked down a straw man version of a much more convincing argument.

Well, I too saw that Daily Mail article.
It incensed me of course. It is not just because it is ‘close to home’ for me. Just the norms of decency make it possible to see that this woman did a great injustice to her husband. And of course to her children.

One of my dear uncles went through this.
At least HIS wife made sure that the second child was biologically his. But it doesn’t take away the fact that his so-called first-born is anything but…
He of course won’t talk about it (at least not with me – which is fine).
But I am sure there HAS to be a way to prosecute these vile women. If for nothing, for common fraud?
I have never understood why this does not seem to be possible, at least under British law…

@ feminist hater – did you actually read my response? The point is that it cannot be proven in court that she knew that the children weren’t his. Obviously she should have told her husband about the possibilty that the kids weren’t his and about her affairs. It also can’t be proven that she didn’t do so, as that would his word against hers. Basically, foul as her actions were this type of thing can’t really be prosecuted. Women will continue to get away with paternity fraud.

I would tell you to go f yourself, but I suspect that you need no prompting from me to do so.

Spacetraveller says “I merely admired the way someone responded to another commenter.
Pip’s mention of her job and personal status was relevant to the question she asked ”

No, it wasn’t. It was SOLELY an attempt as using the STATUS of her position as evidence that she is not “playing at a career.” Laughable.

“As to your other comment about stepfathers, it wasn’t really an accusation against men.”

Yes it was.

“I was using that as a reminder as to the risk posed to children when (both) their parents separate.”

Right, because in 40+ years of women telling men how horrible they are, god forbid a sentence or two should go by without a reminder from a team vag overseer.

“FYI, Dalrock himself has mentioned this risk before when he talked about single mothers and their exposing of their kids to risk by ‘dating’ multiple strange men.
But you asked for evidence from me. So here is one, page 4, line 3-6.http://www.psc.isr.umich.edu/pubs/pdf/rr01-471.pdf”

Don’t hide behind a man. It’s cowardly.

That “study” looks like the typical leftist academic funding justification: a conclusion looking for support. Throw in the fact that women specifically seek out bad actors for the excitement and what you’ve got is simply an excuse to back up the position you’ve already taken. Here’s a crazy idea, if you don’t want bad men in your life, stop driving out the good ones and throwing the door open for the losers.

Pip says: “Don’t expect OP to understand. Living well and ignoring such people is the best recipe.”

The logic of a woman. If that’s your motto then why did you even bother questioning Dalrock’s point in the fist place? Aren’t you already living well in your high status little “career?” If so, then why wouldn’t you follow your own advice and just ignore a site that is NOT going to be easy for any woman of thin skin and feminist brain washing to handle?

Hey T, in most cases of ‘rape’, it’s her word against his. Yet femcunts had no problems pushing their policies through. You really are proving just how much of an unfeeling, unsympathetic ‘Antoinette’ you are.

Keep on keeping on, you’re doing our work for us. A ‘Christian women’ like yourself once again showing the corruption of the church and her principles in favour of women.

The fact that there is such a simple solution to PF, i.e. Paternity Testing at birth or, indeed, before birth, discounts any such notion that PF shall continue into the future. It’s blatant fraud and the corruption reeks from the highest pinnacles of government to the church.

@feminist hater – I’m not sure how my being realistic about the chances of paternity fraud being successfully prosecuted makes me unfeeling and unsympathetic, but if you say so.

I also doubt that paternity testing at birth will ever become the norm, but anyone who has doubts about women in general or their wife in particular should certainly have it done. Makes more sense than finding out that you aren’t the father 20 years after the fact.

T says “Fraud has to be intentional. If she claimed that she cheated on her husband, but thought that the child was his, then it would be hard to prove otherwise. There is no way to prove that she knew he wasn’t the father.”

But, if a woman decides hours, days, weeks, months or years later that a particular sexual encounter no longer falls into her consensual category, she should still be able to press rape charges and see a conviction despite it being then “her” opinion against his?

T says: “I also doubt that paternity testing at birth will ever become the norm, but anyone who has doubts about women in general or their wife in particular should certainly have it done. Makes more sense than finding out that you aren’t the father 20 years after the fact.”

Not only should it become the norm AND the law, perhaps the funding for it should come out of women’s “free” birth control funds! Wouldn’t that be fun?

I’m not sure why people are comparing rape and paternity fraud as though they area the same thing. What does how rape is prosecuted have to do with whether or not paternity fraud can be proven in criminal court?

There is a solution so simple to stopping a crime like Paternity Fraud but T will denounce it till the cows come home. If there were a test that proves a suspect of rape, you know it would be demanded tomorrow by governments around the Western World and people like T would roundly rejoice at its inception.

Why the continued hate of men, T? Paternity tests are a simple prick and use of the blood sample. It’s painless, can be done in the lab and the parents can know in a couple days to a week, depending on the amount of work to be done. There just isn’t an excuse other than that women, like the bitch above, do not want it.

T, you know why rape is comparable to PF? Well two reasons. Both crimes roundly destroy the person they are committed on AND, your excuse covering why PF cannot be prosecuted includes the talk of Evidence. You stated that PF is difficult to prove and I simply stated that the same can be said of rape.

T “I’m not sure why people are comparing rape and paternity fraud as though they area the same thing. What does how rape is prosecuted have to do with whether or not paternity fraud can be proven in criminal court?”

Because both fall under the same STANDARD of systemic logic (they do NOT have to be the same thing to be HANDLED the same way). Why should one bad behavior be waved away with “it can’t be proven because it is he said/she said” while the other is actually proven ONLY on “he said/she said.” The answer will, of course, be found in your own bigotry.

@dalrock let me repost the comment that got the whole conversation started :

“I thought that the “unfairness” of the laws was well known and had been for sometime. Like the old song goes, “Its Cheaper to Keep Her”. It seems that there are a lot more people talking about unfair laws than there are people being treated unfairly in their divorces. Those laws are great if you are a woman with an upper middle class or better husband as a provider, who is capable of earning enough money to support yourself well. Then you can divorce, get child support, alimony and a job (if necessary) and end up living as about as well as you were before with no annoying husband to deal with. Remarriage to another good provider and you are even better off financially because there are now two men supporting your household. The upper middle class rarely divorces despite this, which is why I don’t buy the “women divorce for cash and prizes” argument. The women who would collect the most cash and prizes are least likely to divorce.

If you are the average woman married to the average man then divorce will leave you both broke and benefit neither of you. Chances are both husband and wife are working and both of your incomes are needed to support the family. When the same income has to support two households you’ll both suffer. At this point you can hold the suffering Olympics and argue about who wins gold, but the entire family will medal. A lot of poor women divorce, if they bother to marry at all, because there is little to no benefit to being a poor man’s wife. ”

The initial point was that there was real financial incentive for most women to divorce. Those women who might actually manage to come out ahead financially be divorcing (upper middle class women) are the least likely to do so. So far, no one has managed to refute this. Some posters claimed that child support was a financial benefit, but I pointed out that the expenses of raising the child more than offset the child support in most cases. Again, there is no financial benefit to divorce in most cases.

It’s fascinating to watch women like her. Its like a half finished piece of software that runs along seemingly fine until it reaches the end of the coding and simply crashes, restarts and starts running again from line 1. Amazing.

@GT66. – “Not only should it become the norm AND the law, perhaps the funding for it should come out of women’s “free” birth control funds! Wouldn’t that be fun?”

Right now, anyone who wants a paternity test can go and get one. I have no problem with paternity tests. I see no reason to make them mandatory or make the tax payer pick up the costs. If you want one,go get one and pay for it yourself.

Hey T, do you know that a crime like ‘rape’ doesn’t require intent at all? In certain cases they use tests, such as the ‘Foreseeability test’, which can be used to determine guilt in cases involving loss of control. Not such a stretch to see that working in the case of Adultery and PF.

A Foreseeability test merely implies that whilst one might not have direct control of their actions during the committing of a crime, the actions they took previously however, i.e. drinking or taking drugs, could potentially lead to them committing a crime and that they should have known of these dangers before they partook of them.

Thus a women who has had an affair could reasonably be foreseen to have known that a child born 7 or 10 months later could have been directly attributable to such an affair.

@ TFH – you have no idea how I see men, and really shouldn’t make assumptions. I am not surprised that a group of men, not in prison or in any immediate danger of going to prison and therefore in almost no danger of being actually raped decided that being cuckholded was worse. That still doesn’t mean that it makes sense to compare rape and paternity fraud when discussing the potential for prosecution in a court of criminal law.

Right now, anyone who wants an abortion can go and get one. T has no problem with abortions. She see no reason to make them mandatory though or make the tax payer pick up the costs. If you want one,go get one and pay for it yourself. She also notes the same can be said of birth control or pretty much any part of the imaginary ‘war on women’ rubbish out of the mouths of femcunts.

The saddest thing about the current state of relations between the sexes is that women really seem to not register what a liability to men’s lives they have turned themselves into. They simply don’t see it and I cannot understand how that’s possible.

@ feminist hater –
“T, you know why rape is comparable to PF? Well two reasons. Both crimes roundly destroy the person they are committed on AND, your excuse covering why PF cannot be prosecuted includes the talk of Evidence. You stated that PF is difficult to prove and I simply stated that the same can be said of rape.”

@ feminist hater -” Right now, anyone who wants an abortion can go and get one. T has no problem with abortions. She see no reason to make them mandatory though or make the tax payer pick up the costs. If you want one,go get one and pay for it yourself. She also notes the same can be said of birth control or pretty much any part of the imaginary ‘war on women’ rubbish out of the mouths of femcunts.

Here endeth the lesson.”

So now you are comparing abortion and birth control to paternity testing. Seriously?

GT66,
“Here’s a crazy idea, if you don’t want bad men in your life, stop driving out the good ones and throwing the door open for the losers.”

You make quite an assumption here.
It is wrong, of course. But 1. you weren’t to know, and 2. at least I now understand the rants hurled in my direction.

My menfolk have all been good men. Father, brother, uncles, male cousins, all of them. Also includes the man I am about to marry in a few weeks’ time.

There was no evidence in my comment about Pip or the ones I addressed to TFH, Bob or Opus to suggest that I was swimming in ‘bad men’.

Do not allow yourself and me to derail this thread. It is in my best interests to avoid divorce (and I bet everyone else on this thread hates divorce too, which is why we are all here, I presume). for me personally, it is not only because I am Catholic, but also because I have seen the devastation of other people’s divorces.

Above, I tell of my beloved uncle’s story (his divorce was particularly nasty, as you can well imagine – not only the paternity fraud, but all his worldly possessions gone in a flash). I have already mentioned the general risks posed to children by either parent’s next partner after a divorce.

There is no need to spit fire in my direction.
I am here to learn, same as you.

Rape is certainly not easier than paternity fraud to prove. You just need a Paternity Test, duh. Intention is impossible to prove if you merely ask the suspect if they committed the crime. You have to determine it past a reasonable doubt by using facts, evidence and I refer you to the test I mentioned above as an example of how this is done.

@thf – “Now, if you actually were to keep your mouth closed and read up, you might start to learn more about how women think.”

I’m actually here to learn more about how men think and what men want. I’ve been enjoying the discussions about what men want out of marriage vs what they end up getting. Some of those comments have me thinking about ways that I can improve marriage for my husband. I am enjoying discussing these other issues as well.

“If you are managing to get by [in] private practice, then you are one of very few women who is hacking it without government intervention.”

More women than I can count are doing fine in practice as DVMs. Consider these facts from Veterinary Practice News:

•This year, women hold 78 percent of veterinary school seats, according to the Association of American Veterinary Medical Colleges.
.
•As of 2009, the American Veterinary Medical Association reported, female veterinarians outnumbered their male counterparts for the first time: 44,802 to 43,196.

“Then again, there is the question of the massive affirmative-action that women get.”

See above. Doesn’t exist. And if it did, it would be encouraging more *males* to pursue a DVM degree.

“I would rather take my pet to a male vet, than to one a woman who may or may not be of the same caliber.”

Yeah…I don’t think that’s an issue. See above. And if it was, I would rather take my pet to a female vet, than to one a man who may or may not be of the same caliber

“Your attitude here reveals that like most women, you don’t understand cause and effect very well.”

I think I’m pretty good at it, actually.

“If you could, you should be angry at feminists for the reasons I described, not at the men here.”

Lol. No shaming meant, I just think that you know that argument is faulty. Comparing funding for women’s health care ( and yes even abortion comes under that heading horrible as it is) to mandatory paternity testing is nonsense.

“•This year, women hold 78 percent of veterinary school seats, according to the Association of American Veterinary Medical Colleges.”

Sounds like discrimination to me. A sawbuck says we won’t hear much from feminists wringing their hands about how to rectify such an obvious gender imbalance. At any rate, gotta be somebody to care for all those spinster’s cats so good for you!

@ feminist hater – a paternity test doesn’t prove fraud in and of itself. Did the woman know that she wasn’t carrying her husbands baby? How would we prove that? Did the man know that there was a possibility that the child wasn’t his? How will we prove that one way or the other?

I think that paternity fraud is horrible and ,thankfully,rare. I just don’t see a way of prosecuting the women who ruin the lives of these men and the children. If someone figures out how to make it work, then I’m all for criminal prosecution.

I’m not sure why people are comparing rape and paternity fraud as though they area the same thing. What does how rape is prosecuted have to do with whether or not paternity fraud can be proven in criminal court?

How do you know that PF is rare? Without mandatory Paternity Testing, we actually don’t know. We merely have to trust women to tell the truth. And the question wasn’t why Paternity Testing can’t be proven in court, it can but I will let that slide, it was about why men shouldn’t have free Paternity Testing, at tax payers expense, to prove their children are theirs at birth and that women should be allowed to have free birth control and free abortions, at tax payers expense.

I know your answer, you simply rate women’s needs above those of men’s. Not awfully new to me honestly.

If you are on this site AND trumpeting things like the 78% seating placement in vet school going to women, then angry and hateful are two things I would be willing to say you indeed are. You see it as a source of achievement that men’s ability to compete squarely in the field has been legislatively crippled in favor of women. What would *you* call that?

Read your comment to me again.
Better yet, why don’t we stop throwing inefficient insults around (the coward comment for example, was uncalled for and is even inaccurate given that I provided you with the evidence you asked for. That you found it unsatisfactory is another matter altogether).

Why don’t we now concentrate on the topic at hand?
Yes, I do feel better now that I can finally be left to participate more fruitfully in this interesting debate.

Pip, thanks for your advice. In hindsight, I really should have followed it 3 comments ago, lol.

T,

“I think that paternity fraud is horrible and ,thankfully,rare. I just don’t see a way of prosecuting the women who ruin the lives of these men and the children. If someone figures out how to make it work, then I’m all for criminal prosecution.”

Um, I heard somewhere that this phenomenon is not rare at all! Something like a fifth of kids are living with a man they mistake for their biological father…I forget the exact percentage.

I think the point here is that the woman was unfaithful. That was the first step that ended up with her denying her husband the right to be a father (when he had legally signed up for this ‘privilege’ at the moment of his marriage to a fertile woman).

Perhaps instead of chasing this woman with a rap of paternity fraud, it woud be better if laws prohibiting unfaithfulness in a marriage were brought back?
Then we would have something to charge her with.
Now, I am not advocating Sharia Law for the West. But something that provides men with some assurance that this sort of rampant, blatant flouting of marital law would not be left unchecked might help to redress the balance a bit.

What do you think of this suggestion as a solution to the question you ask?

@ feminist hater – a paternity test doesn’t prove fraud in and of itself. Did the woman know that she wasn’t carrying her husbands baby? How would we prove that? Did the man know that there was a possibility that the child wasn’t his? How will we prove that one way or the other?

I think that paternity fraud is horrible and ,thankfully,rare. I just don’t see a way of prosecuting the women who ruin the lives of these men and the children. If someone figures out how to make it work, then I’m all for criminal prosecution.

T are you for real. There is no way in hell even a female Dalrock reader can be that far gone. You have got to be a plant. Any woman that is married knows who the father of her children is period. I think you are just saying stuff to fuck with everybody. You are doing this playing dumb on purpose.

Very late to the party, but just wanted to add a bit on top of this great post. I don’t know if it’s been reiterated within the last 145 comments.. i just got here 😛

1. The famous quote and the attribution of “her actual conduct combine to create a picture of a woman who simply couldn’t register the immense suffering of countless real life people, because in her mind they were merely props for her own amusement.” could also be just as easily applied to the the women who piled onto the NiceGuysofOKC fiasco. Women who have neither the problem of attaining relationship or casual sex, berating, humiliating and shaming men for wanting the same. They should simply be happy with having to work hard to please and maintain a platonic relationship with those whom they like. In this case, it’s the crumbs of the cake she inhaled.

2. You’re let them ask for custody section really reminded me of something i read not too long ago over at COTWA when you said “As an analogy, imagine a criminal court system where there was virtually no chance of being acquitted if you were part of a specific unfavored class, no matter how strong your case is. If you offer unfavored defendants in this scenario the chance to plead guilty to receive a lower sentence, they will nearly always take it because they have nothing to gain by trying to make their case for innocence.” Try being a large, black man capable of violent behavior being charged with raping a helpless little girl. How more unfavored a class can you get?

3. Thank you for this:
“Yet whenever this debate unfolds, there is a strong tendency of those arguing for justice to try to prove that the men being punished are innocent. They unknowingly take on the female solipsists frame and have a debate about whether those convicted without any form of due process were really guilty or not.”

Not too long ago i got into a debate about sluts, the doom that is marriage to an unbondable slut, divorce stats, and specifically the rates of divorce increasing after each male partner a woman has. I brought up frivolous divorce, nofault divorce and the 67% of all divorces initiated by women. What i got in response was identical.. that we don’t know why the divorces took place so it could indeed be all the mans fault. I really didn’t know what to say at that point. I didn’t have any rational way to disprove that statement even tho anecdotally i know its pure bunk.

The answer as always is ‘Who gains?” In a system that rewards the woman with children and cash a majority of the time regardless of fault.. the answer speaks for itself.

Ah, I see that this is very much a case of ‘the evidence is different depending on which author you read’.
Here is the evidence that *I* was referring to. It comes from the American Association of Blood Banks. The figure here stands at 30%. Staggering and perhaps unbelievable, I know. But there we are. Just like the camera, the Blood Bank doesn’t lie.

in fact, i’d love to see statistics compiled to see which happens more yearly. Not talking sexual assault, but actual rape. (If there are any such statistics on paternity fraud.. i can only find studies that point to sample sizes ranging from 10 to 30%)

We can both use the same ‘under-reported’ caveat and just use the current stats at hand.

Dalrock, there was no feminist agitprop machine in 1932, nor in 1942, nor in 1952, nor in 1962. It was a later development. The most prominent quasi-feminists during those years were Clare Boothe Luce and Mildred McAfee, women of accomplishment with a take on contemporary social life quite distinct from Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, or Barbara Ehrenreich.

You keep referring to a single accident which occurred in preparation for one of her flights (which happens with novel and fairly unreliable technology) and an episode fairly early in her public career as if she never did anything else in the succeeding decade except crash planes. That is just asinine. The woman had her accomplishments and you can acknowledge that even if you think excess attention was paid to her.

Billie Jean King was a fine tennis player. Her career was not without pratfalls and it is unlikely she could have defeated Stan Smith in a singles match. She was still competing at a high level. No need to take that away from her.

@ space traveller -“Ah, I see that this is very much a case of ‘the evidence is different depending on which author you read’.
Here is the evidence that *I* was referring to. It comes from the American Association of Blood Banks. The figure here stands at 30%. Staggering and perhaps unbelievable, I know. But there we are. Just like the camera, the Blood Bank doesn’t lie.

It is unbelievable because it makes no sense, as that link that I gave you explains.

The American association of blood banks does not measure paternity fraud rates. They simply run tests. If a woman shows up with two men to be tested then at least one test will be of course be negative. That negative of course would be counted but no fraud will have taken place. Add to that self selection of the group and it obvious why those rates cannot be applied to the general public.

Oh gawd T, first, the sample sizes in these studies are simply far too small to be of any use. 6000 people in a state the size of California is just rather amusing. Secondly, the reason stated of why they don’t consider releasing such documentation to the husband, even when he directly asks for it, is because it will danger the marriage or the woman’s life. Oh fuck, I wonder why that might be, huh?! Thirdly, comparing high end males with low end males is not very helpful, high end males have more confidence because they have more wealth and power to get better women, it’s not an argument against why men in general don’t need protection. That would be like saying that because high end women suffer less of a threat of rape we can simply forego the rest of womenhood, that sound like a good idea to you?!

And finally, just because a man might have the ability to determine that his great-great-great-great-great grandfather was indeed his blah blah grandfather does in no way help him to know that the child being carried by his wife or girlfriend is actually his, only a Paternity Test will fix that.

@spacetraveller – I don’t really care if we make infidelity illegal. It may technically be illegal in some states still. I think that prosecuting cheating spouses is an impractical waste of tax payer resources, and is unlikely to happen for obvious reasons.

For one thing, these people have never thought about why the divorce rate was 10% in 1965 but rocketed to 45% just a few years later. We know that it was because the laws changed to give women cash and prizes.

The annual attrition rate of marriages (1st, 2d, &c) in 1958 was such that a 20% risk of divorce could be discerned. The flip to a different social ecosystem occurred during the years running from 1967 to 1979 when the implication of the attrition rate trebled and the derived rate of dissolution shot to over half (after which a slow decline in this rate set in). There was some amendment in judicial practice during the 1960s and the beginning of no fault divorce around about 1968 but there were a number of other vectors operating. You had had periods of increase in the prevalence of divorce absent formal legal changes (1919-29, 1935-46).

You again took my comments out of context and deleted relevant portions to claim that I made an argument that is entirely different than the one that I actually made.

T, you were fairly paraphrased with the proper context. He simply juxtaposed in one locus three discrete arguments you made to demonstrate the implications of adhering to all three positions at one time. Looked pretty foolish, but that’s your problem.

I think using tax payers monies to pay for sluts and whores to get free birth control, abortions and welfare for single moms is an atrocious waste of tax payer resources. Yet they are still paid, for obvious reasons of course. What those ‘obvious reasons’ are I shall not say, cuz that’s how T rolls.

You cannot use a random count of 6000 people to conduct tests applicable to a population of 38 million. Your sample size needs to be greater. Also, even if that were true, it would not be fair to the men who were defrauded.

Dalrock, there was no feminist agitprop machine in 1932, nor in 1942, nor in 1952, nor in 1962. It was a later development.

Sylvia Pankhurst , just one example, was a feminist and a socialist, and not all feminists were women. Socialism very much had an agitprop machine in 1932, and many of those who funded the suffragette movement were men. Her mother Emmeline Pankhurst was another and she married Richard Pankhurst, a man who supported feminism, and it was his money that funded it. She also was involved in the socialist movement.

@ Art Deco – “T, you were fairly paraphrased with the proper context. He simply juxtaposed in one locus three discrete arguments you made to demonstrate the implications of adhering to all three positions at one time. Looked pretty foolish, but that’s your problem.”

He took parts of a conversation out of relevant context, and omitted posts and parts of posts that contradicted the picture of my position that he wanted to paint. It made for good reading, but I can’t take it seriously. I don’t think that his argument would convince anyone who wasn’t already convinced of his point unless they didn’t read the original comment thread. Of course most people aren’t going to read a comment thread that long so to that end his strategy, while intellectually dishonest, is effective. It is also entertaining so I don’t hold it against him.

“I think that prosecuting cheating spouses is an impractical waste of tax payer resources, and is unlikely to happen for obvious reasons.”

Well, I do see your point. It may turn out to be a very expensive exercise…
But it is however worth noting that in countries where this is practised, infidelity is somewhat lower than in the West.
And with that, paternity fraud.

The issue about the American Blood Bank testing is that if a woman takes two men to be tested against her child, she would have ‘selected’ one as the true father (in her opinion). The data shows that 30% of the time, who the mother believes to be the true father is not.

Also, if it is a self-selected group because the men have ‘suspicions’, then it is quite possible that the percentage MIGHT be HIGHER in the general population where there are no suspicions and therefore no-one is even seeking a test. In the case being discussed here, remember that the man in question went 20 years before he got ‘suspicious’. My uncle went 17 years before he found out.

If the law cannot be used, then there has to be another way to stop ar at least stall this crime. I call it a crime because it is fraud. Embezzlers go to prison. Because they have committed fraud.

This is fraud against the man, against the child, (whose true genetic heritage has been concealed from him/her).

As to comparisons between rape and paternity fraud, let me offer this:
To a man who has been subjected to paternity fraud, it is the worst thing on Earth.
To a woman who has been raped, it is the worst thing on Earth.

“Better yet, why don’t we stop throwing inefficient insults around (the coward comment for example, was uncalled for and is even inaccurate given that I provided you with the evidence you asked for. That you found it unsatisfactory is another matter altogether).”

Disingenuous. My coward comment was made based on you attempting to draw another man in to hide behind. It had nothing to do with the “study” you submitted.

“Why don’t we now concentrate on the topic at hand?
Yes, I do feel better now that I can finally be left to participate more fruitfully in this interesting debate.”

Oh, I see, now you’re gonna cry victim unless I adjust to how *YOU* think this debate should go. This right here is why men are disengaging from women. I speak the way I speak and write the way I write and have ABSOLUTE right to use whatever words and tone I see fit. You don’t like it? Tough. No one is forcing you to respond.

“Pip, thanks for your advice. In hindsight, I really should have followed it 3 comments ago, lol.”

You should have. You are out of your element. You seem to think what is going on is a lark.

“Perhaps instead of chasing this woman with a rap of paternity fraud, it woud be better if laws prohibiting unfaithfulness in a marriage were brought back? Then we would have something to charge her with.”

Do you have any notion of what a contract is? What am I saying? Of course you don’t since women haven’t been held to one in decades if ever.

“Now, I am not advocating Sharia Law for the West.”
Then I will. You have far more to lose in such a system than I ever will and the system leaves NOTHING for men anyway so for us, we can only go up from here.

@ feminist hater – “You cannot use a random count of 6000 people to conduct tests applicable to a population of 38 million. Your sample size needs to be greater. Also, even if that were true, it would not be fair to the men who were defrauded.”

There is no credible evidence to support a paternity fraud rate of much higher than 1%. I agree that it is unfair to those that are defrauded.

1% is the floor of “studies of the general population”. You know, where mommy signs up for a study where her child will be tested to see if mommy lied about who the father is. The conclusion we can arrive at from these studies is that 1% of the female population are both cheaters and REALLY REALLY DUMB.

@spacetraveller- the AABB measures positives and negatives. If you take two men in because you don’t know who the father is in then at least one test must be negative, giving you a negative rate of 50% with no paternity fraud having occurred. If you take one man telling him that aren’t sure and test him and he is not the father then that test count as a negative with no fraud having occurred. For a myriad of reasons that frankly should be obvious, you cannot use those numbers to determine instances of paternity fraud in the general public. I believe that the AABB has even stated that their numbers cannot be used in this way. If you don’t get this, then we will have to agree to disagree.

They sure want the system they have, don’t they? If only us uppity peasants just would shut up and let them have it. After how, we males have the majority suicides, mental illness, incarceration, drug addiction and work place deaths and *still* we demand more. How dare we? Why can’t we just enjoy our cake quietly?

I am well aware that the marraige contract is indeed a contract. I should know, I am about to sign one very soon. But clearly the law does not see the fidelity vow within it as LEGALLY binding, which is precisely why we are in this situation where a woman who has broken her vows is not prosecuted under the law of the land.

What I suggested to T was to use the law to target people like the woman who cheated, particularly when the infidelity leads to children conceived out of the marriage bond.

So your statement as to women not being held to a contract is actually ever more correct. I agree with you there. I seek a way to address this issue, but as T argues, my suggestion may not be practical.

So, back to the drawing board.

The reason I do not advocate Sharia Law for the West is not because I think it is too stringent. The reason is that Sharia Law is a specific component of Islam. To embrace Sharia Law (as you do) is to embrace Islam for the West.

Which is fine if you are already a Muslim or if you think Islam in the West is the way forward.

I for one would hate the idea of changing religion just so that a moral code (THAT IS ALREADY ENDORSED BY MY PRESENT RELIGION) can be enforced.

But like you, I would like to see an end to this madness. If you think Sharia Law is the way forward, fine.
But I am going to Mass on a Sunday, thank you very much.

@ whatever – “1% is the floor of “studies of the general population”. You know, where mommy signs up for a study where her child will be tested to see if mommy lied about who the father is. The conclusion we can arrive at from these studies is that 1% of the female population are both cheaters and REALLY REALLY DUMB.”

IIRC 1% is the rate that they find when they test for genetic illnesses in sick children. The mother would have no idea at the time of conception that this testing would happen later.

I’m not sure why people are comparing rape and paternity fraud as though they area the same thing.

Because they are the biological counterparts of each other. Rape forces a woman to invest her limited parenting resources on a child from an unfit father. Paternity fraud forces a man to invest his limited parenting resources on a child which isn’t his. The difference is, men generally have a great deal of empathy when women are raped.

If women had a reciprocal degree of empathy for men, mandatory paternity testing wouldn’t face opposition from women and it would pass as a no brainer. Instead, when it is proposed women say but what about meeeeeeeeee!

“I do not support a paternity bill,” said state Rep. Sherry Jones, a Nashville Democrat. “I think it’s a real affront to women to say that every baby born has to have a paternity test.”

Rebecca Kopp agrees. She recently finished filling out the birth certificate paperwork for her three-month-old son.

“I think it’s offensive because I am married,” Kopp said. “Even for women who aren’t married, if they want to get a birth certificate, I think that that should be their right. I don’t think they should have to prove who the father is.”

@ dalrock – I am against the creation of what would essentially be a national DNA database. I consider it an invasion of privacy with a huge potential for misuse. I am all for people who want paternity tests having them, but not for them forcing those tests on the rest of us.

T,
Fair enough. one could argue that from this data the true value even for this unrepresentative sample could be half of 30%, or maybe a third of 30% if every woman brought in 3 different men to be tested, and so on…

The point is, it would really surprise me if it were only 1%. The true value projected to the general population should be higher than this.
But hey ho, I am no statistician.

What concerns one more is how to deal with the problem itself. I guess the percentages are an exercise in semantics.

“Because they are the biological counterparts of each other. Rape forces a woman to invest her limited parenting resources on a child from an unfit father. Paternity fraud forces a man to invest his limited parenting resources on a child which isn’t his. The difference is, men generally have a great deal of empathy when women are raped.”

Another difference is physical violence. I can see why one is criminally prosecuted and the other is not. Women have a great deal of empathy for men who experience paternity fraud. Luckily for men, they have the option of discovering paternity fraud without mandatory testing, just like women have the option of aborting or adopting out pregnancies caused by rapists.

Is slavery still ‘slavery’ if I don’t abuse my slave with a whip myself but only threats of violence if he didn’t want to be a slave anymore? Ala, police, courts and sheit!

Ah, good to know that 20 years of working for something that isn’t your’s is not ‘violence’ against your bodily integrity and does not constitute being a victim in the eyes of T . I’m sorry Dalrock, this woman is off the chart. I wonder if she would have the same attitude if we were to start talking about ’emotional abuse’ within reasons for divorce and if it were real or not…

Rape is really a 1% issue too, I think it would beehove all of us to decriminalize it. After all, if a woman believes she has been raped, she can have a DNA test done, and she can pay for it.

Not if you want it to be admissible in court it isn’t. It must be ordered by a court, and usually only during child support hearings a judge will allow a paternity test. This is just in the US.

it is illegal in UK, France and Germany.

Its nice to be able to spew “1%” rates from your white ivory tower. However in the AA community the rate is 10% check your privilege casper. How are poor black men supposed to pay for their own paternity test?

Using a “DNA DATABASE” Alex Jones strawmen is a convenient way to discount the idea with the very corporate police-state women have voted into existence.

The reason I think this is a lark for you is because your are getting married soon. You only really seem to have an interest insofar as this relates to marriage generally and honestly, yours in particular. I get the impression, that once you have this out of your system, it’ll best last week’s trend to you. Of course I can be wrong, but that is the impression I get.

So far in the women vs men saga, I’ve seen two types of women, those that dismiss men’s opinions outright (calling us losers or a hate group, T) and those who pretend to care and drop us the moment a shinier toy catches their eye (you).

In France, a couple wishing to marry have to undergo a barrage of medical tests that the other party has to be made aware of. This is to keep the annulment rate low (annulment, not divorce – France being a Catholic country, um, at least was).

I am sure this is distasteful to many, but that’s the law.

I can well imagine that paternity testing will be distasteful to virtuous women as you rightly point out. But if it is the law, everyone shuts up and puts up eventually.
And problems down the road are avoided.

The only problem is, in a marriage where the children come after the wedding, it is too late to do anything about paternity fraud. There goes another broken marriage (but at the 2 year mark rather than the 20 year mark).

@ybm- first black people are about 13% of the population. Why should we force everyone to be tested because of higher rates in the AA community. Secondly, IIRC when they tested for paternity fraud they used fewer black people. Of course that would make the rates look higher than those of the rest of the population. I doubt that the problem is much more serious than it is for everyone else. There’s always this relatively inexpensive testing like this http://www.foxnews.com/health/2012/08/24/who-your-daddy-paternity-testing-van-offers-quick-dna-results/

Dalrock, there was no feminist agitprop machine in 1932, nor in 1942, nor in 1952, nor in 1962. It was a later development. The most prominent quasi-feminists during those years were Clare Boothe Luce and Mildred McAfee, women of accomplishment with a take on contemporary social life quite distinct from Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, or Barbara Ehrenreich.

Then why did she receive a heroes welcome for riding as a passenger? As I showed the whole thing was set up as a feminist publicity stunt, and the press ran with it. If that isn’t agitprop, please tell me what is?

The idea that there was no feminist movement then is also false. Earhart herself was a feminist. Again from her wiki page:

[Earhart] was instrumental in the formation of The Ninety-Nines, an organization for female pilots.[5] Earhart joined the faculty of the Purdue University aviation department in 1935 as a visiting faculty member to counsel women on careers and help inspire others with her love for aviation. She was also a member of the National Woman’s Party, and an early supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment.

@Art Deco

You keep referring to a single accident which occurred in preparation for one of her flights (which happens with novel and fairly unreliable technology) and an episode fairly early in her public career as if she never did anything else in the succeeding decade except crash planes. That is just asinine. The woman had her accomplishments and you can acknowledge that even if you think excess attention was paid to her.

What exactly did she do which was so extraordinary? She was a media fabrication from the beginning. Her 1932 Newfoundland to Northern Ireland solo flight which won her the Distinguished Flying Cross was of a comparable route taken by Alcock and Brown in 1919 in an open cockpit WWI bomber (much shorter than Lindbergh’s 1927 NY to Paris flight). She made this flight in a plane which a year earlier two men had used to fly around the world. The only thing extraordinary about the flight was the pilot’s lack of a penis. If I’m wrong, tell me what else would have us even discussing it nearly 100 years later.

I’m not saying she was a terrible pilot. From what I can tell she was probably a mediocre one. But she was no pioneer. Pioneers push the limits of the technology of the day. This is what Alcock and Brown as well as Lindbergh did. AE wasn’t even up to date on the technology of the day. She didn’t know morse code, she clearly struggled with the Lockheed Vega, and she didn’t know how to use the navigational equipment on board. Contrast this to Lindbergh, whom she is presumably the female counterpart of, who flew NY to Paris in a plane so highly modified (by his own design) that he could only see forward via a periscope. She was a media invention from the beginning.

Let me put it this way. What would a media fabrication look like if she doesn’t fit the bill? If she wasn’t one, I would offer that no such thing exists.

In France, a couple wishing to marry have to undergo a barrage of medical tests that the other party has to be made aware of. This is to keep the annulment rate low (annulment, not divorce – France being a Catholic country, um, at least was).

@ feminist hater –
“Is slavery still ‘slavery’ if I don’t abuse my slave with a whip myself but only threats of violence if he didn’t want to be a slave anymore? Ala, police, courts and sheit!

Ah, good to know that 20 years of working for something that isn’t your’s is not ‘violence’ against your bodily integrity and does not constitute being a victim in the eyes of T . I’m sorry Dalrock, this woman is off the chart. I wonder if she would have the same attitude if we were to start talking about ‘emotional abuse’ within reasons for divorce and if it were real or not…”

Paternity fraud is a horrible thing. I just don’t think that there is a way to successfully prosecute it most of the time.

“If you are on this site AND trumpeting things like the 78% seating placement in vet school going to women, then angry and hateful are two things I would be willing to say you indeed are.”

*chuckle* I think once we’ve reached the point where speculation on someone’s emotional state is the centerpiece of argument, we can safely assume (1) no one else in the forum cares much about the result of the thread, and (2) not much more needs to be said in response. It’s sort of like accusing someone of being a Nazi. (see: Godwin’s Law)

Spacetraveller said:

“Pip, thanks for your advice. In hindsight, I really should have followed it 3 comments ago, lol.”

When people are in that weird defensive space where they are not arguing in good faith, there’s not much point in going on. (I say that as a past sinner who would go on! 🙂

This much is clear to me: paternity testing should be mandatory for every single birth. The mere fact that women could just name a man as the father and get support from him without any evidence is a complete injustice.

I don’t see the problem at all. If its the law, those who are doing nothing wrong will be fine, and those that are cheating will be punished. It’s the law, so personal feelings have nothing to do with it. Yet those representatives that Dalrock quoted have such a lack of empathy for defrauded men that they believe that a woman should have the option to lie about who the father is, just by saying “trust me!”

They can’t even abide by this simple precaution — one that doesn’t even hurt the innocent. Instead, they want to expose innocent men to state-sanctioned robbery.

For T, who says that the paternity fraud rate is only 1%: it doesn’t matter. Just as rape is illegal and prosecuted no matter what the rape rate is, it should be the same with paternity fraud. But of course, this system is all about freeing women from any sort of responsibility. Here you have a chance to nip paternity fraud in the bud, yet you cannot bring yourself to support something as simple as mandatory paternity testing.

Those of you new to the blog, you’re receiving a good education here about how the system detests men, even those who have committed no crimes.

The general figure is thought to be about 10%, but this varies culturally and by the paternity confidence of the father. For fathers in the US and Canada who are highly confident in their paternity, the rate is roughly 2%. For fathers in the US and Canada who have low paternity confidence, it is roughly 30%. Source.

T “Paternity fraud is a horrible thing. I just don’t think that there is a way to successfully prosecute it most of the time.”

So, a woman has no idea if there’s been any but her husband’s penis inside her? Seriously, how could this be hard NOT to prosecute. *IF* she has been sleeping around then she KNOWS there is a chance the child is not her husbands. Besides the fact that she already broke the marriage contract, doing ANYTHING but informing her husband that is a possibility the child is not his, shows INTENT to commit fraud. You base your entire assumption that intent is hard to prove by virtue of the fact that the woman in question is such a moron she would have NO IDEA how that sperm got inside her. Unless she claims rape and it is proven, doing ANYTHING other than telling her husband would IMO be more than enough to show intent. Of course, we know what would happen next: This quality specimen would claim she didn’t tell her husband cuz she was ascared of him.

Yes, weird things have been going on in France for a while, true.
Whilst divorce is indeed legal, efforts are nonetheless being made to reduce the ANNULMENT rate as people who are religious and don’t want to go the divorce route use annulment as the way out. One of the commonest excuses is the discovery of an illness that was not disclosed at the time of the wedding. This makes the whole marriage invalid, so annulment is a possible loophole.

France wised up to this phenomenon and started the whole mandatory testing thing.

Also, mandatory pre-marriage courses are another attempt by the Catholic Church worldwide to drive down specifically annulment.
It is very hard to argue your case for annulment if you had a pre-marriage course which requires you (forces you in fact) to take a closer look at who you are marrying.
Whilst pre-marriage courses have always been encouraged, they were not previously MANDATORY.

It would be simple to do as the bible commands in Leviticus and punish adultery as God commanded,upon testimony to two witnesses.
Stones are cheap.
Punish the sin and it will cease to occur amongst you.

I wish the fem-trolls would get all ‘troofy’ ad just say what they mean:
” A woman can do whatever she wants to,and if the man complains she can call the coppers and put him in goal.”

(And wymyn will fight to keep it that way)

BTW: real rape stats are %.02 to %2 of the population and real PF rates are %10-%18.
If you;re honest,that is.
So the bad stuff happens to men at 7 times the rate,same as the suicides,makes sense does it not.
(not a question)

PIP “When people are in that weird defensive space where they are not arguing in good faith, there’s not much point in going on.”

#1) YOU started off by taking D’s comment personally from a “weird defensive space.”
#2) YOU were the one the brought up your emotional state you piece of work. If it was off limits for commentary then YOU shouldn’t have brought it up.
#3) Insert bannable expletive about you and something you can go do to yourself.

From the biological perspective, cuckoldry is way worse than rape. Even if the latter results in pregnancy, the child is still half hers. Of course nowadays no rape needs to result in any kid.

By contrast, the kid is zero his in the case of PF. And in the modern world, where the average kid costs about a quarter of a megabuck to raise to age 18, the male “investment” is much greater than the woman’s strictly feminine investment – since a man can get a kid (one certainly half his own) via a donor egg and surrogate for about a fifth that.

I’m sorry, the part of “playing peasant” reminds me so much of the “White House” garden I cannot help but mention it. That and how the FDA, USDA and every other governmental agency is angling to kill off family farms and small operations.

Sometimes I feel a little guilty after reading posts like this because I collect alimony and child support from my ex…what you guys call “cash and prizes”. However, he left me for another woman and I am a stay at home mom of 3 small children. I suppose the custody/alimony/child support laws were originally put in place to protect women like me, who were abandoned by their husbands while financially dependent on them. I do feel like my ex does have an obligation to continue to provide for me until the children are in school full time and I have secured adequate employment to support myself. Afterall, we both agreed when our first child was born that I should quit my well paying job to stay home. It was HIS choice to betray me and leave the family, not mine. Now if I were the one that had decided to leave the marriage, for whatever reason short of severe physical abuse or infidelity, I do not think I would be entitled to his provisioning at all in the form of alimony and I truly do not understand the mindset of women who do. I think the problem is with no fault divorce and, like you pointed out, that there is really no “case by case” basis when it comes to family court decisions. It really should matter which spouse is making the decision to divorce or which spouse was unfaithful, etc., when it comes to decisions on alimony, custody and child support. I feel that if a women leaves a marriage for frivolous reasons (basically anything other than HIS infidelity or severe physical abuse or any abuse of the children) then she has forfeited her right to his future provisioning. That seems like justice to me. Unfortunately, because of a small portion of women who are in my situation, blanket decisions are made in family courts that tend to be extremely beneficial for women and extremely biased against men. I know that’s wrong and my heart goes out to men who lose so much financially and emotionally because of this, but I must admit that I am glad that these protections are place for me and my children, at least until I am in a better position to support us all myself.

Another difference is physical violence. I can see why one is criminally prosecuted and the other is not. Women have a great deal of empathy for men who experience paternity fraud. Luckily for men, they have the option of discovering paternity fraud without mandatory testing, just like women have the option of aborting or adopting out pregnancies caused by rapists.

I guess you have never seen cops do a warrant for an arrest for contempt of court. i know what you are thinking. If the woman doesn’t resist she won’t get beat but the threat is still violence. Sams, same google video of a cop tasing a guy or just shooting. Or better yet on pay day had me 480 of your dollars and I’ll thank you by calling you a stupid bitch. Do that for 14 years.
Your husband is in real trouble. The man has nothing.

“You only really seem to have an interest insofar as this relates to marriage generally and honestly, yours in particular.”

Imagine that.
An engaged woman interested in marriage in general and hers in particular.

I am struggling to understand why I haven’t been bundled off to the village square and publicly flogged yet. Afterall, this is a serious crime against humanity!

Being here, learning stuff from the blog author and the intelligent commenters means I get to be a great wife to my husband-to-be one day soon, and for the rest of our lives. It means there will be one fewer man suffering the woes of this current mayhem we call society. It means my uncle’s pain is not exerienced by my fiancé.

To a Brit (which I am), a ‘lark’ means a joke.
I am at least grateful that you do not seem to think that the topic of marriage is one big joke to me.
Thank God for small mercies.

As to ‘shinier toys’, all I can say to that is, interesting turn of phrase…

@ space traveller “Being here, learning stuff from the blog author and the intelligent commenters means I get to be a great wife to my husband-to-be one day soon, and for the rest of our lives. It means there will be one fewer man suffering the woes of this current mayhem we call society. It means my uncle’s pain is not exerienced by my fiancé.”

I do not understand why some of the try so hard to run off women. Wives, soon to be wives and even ex wives can only benefit from reading along with these discussions.

Yes. A fair family law system would levy punishments only on adulterers and serious abusers, with evidence. It all sounds so reasonable too, but no one actually wants things to change, instead coasting by on romantic illusions.

Those men that do want the current family law system to change are bashed as “misogynists” and the like.

I am against the creation of what would essentially be a national DNA database. I consider it an invasion of privacy with a huge potential for misuse. I am all for people who want paternity tests having them, but not for them forcing those tests on the rest of us.

What about this instead:

The birth certificate application section filled out by the mother should include an optional box for her to check if she swears under penalty of law that it is absolutely impossible that another man could be the child’s father. The law should require a minimum penalty of 5 years prison for checking this box if the child is later shown to not be related to the father. If the box is unchecked, a paternity test is required to put the father’s name on the certificate but only the results (father/not father) and not the actual DNA sequence or sample can be saved. Furthermore a man should never be jailed or forced to pay child support for a child he can prove he didn’t father. The man should also have legal recourse against the mother for any financial support he was tricked or legally forced into providing.

GT66 “You only really seem to have an interest insofar as this relates to marriage generally and honestly, yours in particular.”

Spacetraveller: “Imagine that.
An engaged woman interested in marriage in general and hers in particular.”

GT66: Thanks for confirming that typical of women, you are only really in it for you. For a second there I thought I found a NAWALT the famed unicorn of the manosphere.

Spacetraveller: “I am struggling to understand why I haven’t been bundled off to the village square and publicly flogged yet. After all, this is a serious crime against humanity!”

GT66: Hyuk, hyuk, hyuk…. sooooo funny.

Spacetraveller: “Being here, learning stuff from the blog author and the intelligent commenters means I get to be a great wife to my husband-to-be one day soon, and for the rest of our lives. It means there will be one fewer man suffering the woes of this current mayhem we call society. It means my uncle’s pain is not exerienced by my fiancé. ”

I don’t understand it either. But one person’s incoherent rants won’t detract me from what I see as a serious business. I will learn what I need to learn from blogs such as this, and mine of course (where certain commenters provide amazing insights).
Occasional distractions are ‘water off a duck’s back’ as we say in Britspeak.

Martian Bachelor,

“From the biological perspective, cuckoldry is way worse than rape. Even if the latter results in pregnancy, the child is still half hers.”

Oh the cruel wickedness of Nature…

A woman who is raped does NOT want to have a child out of this incident, (and pregnancy is bad enough even when wanted…) but of course she runs the risk that she will.

A man who has been ‘paternity defrauded’ as in the case of that man in the Daily Mail article, usually WANTS the child to be his, not least because he is paying for him/her, but also of course, because he expected fidelity as a given…and he is therefore heavily reliant on the woman to pass on his genes.

The “Let them pay child support” argument is also insidious because it suggests that money is the primary, or even the sole, contribution a father makes to the well-being of a child. There is no consideration given to the father’s role as protector, example-setter, enforcer and leader.

“a paternity test doesn’t prove fraud in and of itself. Did the woman know that she wasn’t carrying her husbands baby? How would we prove that?”

T, this sounds silly. If the woman is married, from a moral standpoint there should be no question she is carrying her husband’s baby. Again, if the wife has been faithful, and her husband is the only man she has had sex with, the child’s paternity cannot be in question and the results of a paternity test are a foregone conclusion.

But if she has not been faithful, then the wife must know there is a chance the baby she is carrying is not her husband’s.

So saying “did the woman know that she wasn’t carrying her husband’s baby” doesn’t help your case. If she has been faithful, she knows the baby is her husband’s. If she has not, she knows the baby might not be her husband’s.

I do not understand why some of the try so hard to run off women. Wives, soon to be wives and even ex wives can only benefit from reading along with these discussions.

Men have no “safe space” in the public sphere. While men have historically proven resilient to this, it remains a source of frustration to see a de facto male “safe space” spring up, even in virtual space, only to be relentlessly trolled by a bunch of brainless trouts. While I don’t care where you vent your spleen, I can certainly “understand” the reaction of so many, even if you can’t.

No one can “run off” anyone except for the admin; and he’s proven tolerant, both to female participation and to men chafing at the females who come here for attention-whoring purposes. I realize that this is your latest attempt at a passive-aggressive shaming of all my brothers who won’t just shut up and man up, and compliment you on your subtlety. You’re getting better at it.

T says: “I do not understand why some of the try so hard to run off women. Wives, soon to be wives and even ex wives can only benefit from reading along with these discussions.”

I’m not running anyone off nor even trying for that matter. Perhaps in this forum men should do that which they are forced to do in every other aspect of male/female interaction and just say “yes dear” and keep their mouths shut otherwise.

It is beyond apparent that you T, spacetraveller and pip have no interest in looking at these issues from the male side of the fence at all. You wonder what for the marriage strike? You wonder where have all the good men gone? You wonder at the growing number of “man-boys” never taking jobs and playing video games all day? Well look no further than a thread like this where the majority of men have stopped talking to you out of pure frustration.

You wanted engagement but when men engage you immediately demand the same old female privileges be put in place: no questioning princess. Only the female perspective matters. No matter what you say as a man, REMEMBER: women have it worse, suffer more, etc. etc. etc.. and therefore men don’t have anything to say and therefore have no issues worth serious consideration. So, because rape exists and *some* women are raped, paternity fraud can not be solved nor should any resource be wasted on it. You wanna know why men walk away? Because of women like you: lip service specialists at best and outright saboteurs at worst.

This entire thread is a here and now demonstration of “let them eat cake” without any effort having been expended to make it so. You did it just by your nature. Good job.

I said:
“1% is the floor of “studies of the general population”. You know, where mommy signs up for a study where her child will be tested to see if mommy lied about who the father is. The conclusion we can arrive at from these studies is that 1% of the female population are both cheaters and REALLY REALLY DUMB.”

Nonsense response:
IIRC 1% is the rate that they find when they test for genetic illnesses in sick children. The mother would have no idea at the time of conception that this testing would happen later.

I’m a little confused about how a “sick child” stops a woman from refusing to consent to the tests. If you want to pull out your “a woman loves her child more than anything” nonsense, well,
A.That’s a lie. As “Mommy Blows Up The Marriage Because She Is Sad” happens all the time. And the factured hearts of the children don’t seem to bother the Mommy at all in many of these cases.
B.Mommy can justify it “for the needs of the child” cause the testing would cause a divorce.

So again,
The conclusion we can arrive at from these studies is that 1% of the female population are both cheaters and REALLY REALLY DUMB.”
or perhaps:
Less than 10% of cheaters care more about their children than they do themselves. Given a 10% cheater rate.

@ dalrock – “The birth certificate application section filled out by the mother should include an optional box for her to check if she swears under penalty of law that it is absolutely impossible that another man could be the child’s father. The law should require a minimum penalty of 5 years prison for checking this box if the child is later shown to not be related to the father. If the box is unchecked, a paternity test is required to put the father’s name on the certificate but only the results (father/not father) and not the actual DNA sequence or sample can be saved. Furthermore a man should never be jailed or forced to pay child support for a child he can prove he didn’t father. The man should also have legal recourse against the mother for any financial support he was tricked or legally forced into providing.”

That sounds more reasonable than a DNA database. Still it will never happen.

The problem with playing “career woman” is simple: no matter what, work needs to be done.

Case in point: in the last thirty years, the percentage of female doctors has risen from 50,000 person city/town.) In the old days, immigrant janitors and plumber’s helpers would stereotypically complain about how “I was a cardiologist/law professor/etc. in the Old Country!” Now, pharmaceutical errors have skyrocketed because “English is my third language” is no longer a detriment to practicing medicine in America. In the old days, a doctor would have to practice for decades to earn six figures in a year. Now, the few newbie doctors who *don’t* start at the $100,000+ mark are those doctors who directly enter into government or charitable service. In the old days, a doctor would *start* at 70-hour weeks and taper down. Now, you’re as likely to work a 70-hour week as a 1-year resident as you will as a 25-year veteran (unless, of course, youre a woman.) Fewer working doctors leads to more gridlock, and women doctors are statistically and visibly less likely to work a 30+ year career as men.

Second: there is a limited amount of space for training. Again, to put it bluntly, there are only *so many* slots for prospective medical students in America. As mentioned above, if American medical schools can pump out about 100,000 per decade, then the people should expect to be able to receive at least 540,000 hours of medical service per doctor per career (60 hours a week * 300 days a year * 30+ years), and ultimately 540 billion hours per graduating class. In America, at least 5% of all of our citizens suffer from chronic illnesses and another 5% are sick or injured at any given time. That’s at least 10% (30 million) people who will need medical care at any given time (never mind pregnancies, yearly checkups, sports physicals…) When medical schools choose their students, they are (unofficially) mandated to take longevity into account (a quality that has been excised from consideration when women are applying.) Unfortunately, they have to turn away people to maintain gender parity. When they began turning away male prospects to beef up female graduation rates, men began to leave the profession. Ever wonder why *finance* and **law** have such bad reputations, yet have so many male students? Because going into medicine is close to a dead end for any non-white female/B+-earning minority (and those white female students far outnumber black, Asian, Hispanic and Native applicants, to the point that non-white female applicants are mostly drawn from immigrant populations.)
And when they drop out, they *drop out*. Most applicants will *never* make more than a second attempt at being accepted into medical school. White guys will go into finance, blacks and Hispanics and Natives will go into “grievance” specialties or social sciences. Non-white women, conversely, slip through the cracks only to be left behind when the time comes for the middle-class white doctor to become “Mommy” (after all, 1st-generation immigrants tend to try to stack as much money as possible, leading them to embrace the overworked lifestyle for financial compensation.)

Third, they increase costs. Besides the costs incurred in overtime for the remaining doctors, I mean. Women doctors, for example, order far more supplemental tests than their male counterparts, even for relatively simple conditions. They also are more likely to rely on “new” medicines for treatment, than therapy or behaviour modification. They also are more likely to “trade up”(go into specialised training) for fringe conditions (neurology, dermatology, etc.), which increases academic costs and limits their long-term effectiveness as standard doctors. Also, female doctors (on average) are far less willing to work in rural or low-population environments than male doctors, a situation that leads to literal “medical deserts” (try living in a state like Idaho or Vermont and finding a female doctor in the sticks that’s under the age of 45, then compare the ratios with male doctors of any age.) This leads to a country in which doctors are all over cities, but think that living more than an hour away from “fun” is an insult (at least, until they age out of their seats on the carousel”.) This leads to government intrusion of medicine (and government makes everything more expensive.) But, back to expense…
Part B-when female doctors get pregnant, they limit their hours (mostly. Some of them are workhorses who will set on a ward until their water breaks. Not many, but…) But, people don’t stop getting sick or injured because “Emily Owens, MD” wants to fulfill her biological imperative. Hospitals need a certain amount of staff on hand, so they’re forced to make their remaining doctors work overtime (cha-ching) and to hire temps to make up the loss to avoid burnout (Super Cha-ching!!!) Government-funded hospitals pay through the nose, private hospitals pay even more. Pharmacies and dental offices pay *even more* for their substitutes. Think of it as a 15% extra (government), 25% extra (private) and 33% extra (specialty offices). Those costs, well, they get *passed on to us*! Isn’t that wonderful! Not only do we get the benefit of trading doctors like baseball cards (patient-doctor rapport-familiarity is obviously stupid and unnecessary), but we also pay even *more* money to give our private information to *strangers*! Instead of even the expectation of confidentiality that a standard doctor relationship entails, you get to relay all sorts of private info to Drs. Lam, Banda or Winston while your “choice mommy” runs between OB appointments or sits home with the baby (and those doctors are all claiming more money from your insurers than your former doctor would. Substitutes, in the medical community, always cost more than the originals.)

My mentor is a pharmacist of 20+ years. From 1985 to 2000, he was paid about $45/hour. In the last decade, as his female contemporaries have retired and his (increasingly) female “heirs” have decided to “take a break”, his pay has jumped to $100/hour. His “relief” pharmacist is a part-timer who earns about $125/hour for a 20-30 hour work week. I should add that my mentor has decided to retire and take on part-time work. I should also add that his “relief” is adamant about keeping his support position, despite the fact that working full time would net him more benefits, paid malpractice insurance and a 25% raise! After all, he’s earning $10,000 a month *after* taxes, for about 2 days a week of work! And he lives in New York City, with about $7000/month in his pocket after he pays rent and utilities! Why work 5 days and 70 hours a week when you’re able to put $30,000 a year in the bank while working weekends? And as he puts it nicely, “If they decide to let my contract lapse, there’s always another chain out there with half of their female employees gone at any given time. But, f*ck them, I’ve almost got enough money for a boat!”

And I’m just talking about the medical field. I’m not talking about the military, or manufacturing or any other job that *needs* to be done by reliable people in a set manner on a regular basis for optimal effectiveness.

Here’s he missing part: women take more time off than men. Women now outnumber men in attaining access to medical training 2:1 and outnumber men in graduating from medical school 55:45. This limits the amount of readily available medical care in America (if/when they decide to become mothers) and opens the door for faulty workers (doctors who know nothing about their parents, doctors who learned English as *adults, etc) because people don’t stop getting sick or hurting themselves or others because your biological clock is chiming.

T says: “a paternity test doesn’t prove fraud in and of itself. Did the woman know that she wasn’t carrying her husbands baby? How would we prove that?”

Said woman obviously must have been raped in her sleep or while unconscious. After all, there is certainly no way that she could have consciously slept with and been impregnated by another man. No way at all.

After reading this little bit from the NYT article on the death of dating and courtship, I feel like I’m living in a foreign land or something. I might ask and I might just order, but I wouldn’t spend time worrying about what she was going to think if I did one or the other. WTF?!?

“It’s hard to read a woman exactly right these days,” she added. “You don’t know whether, say, choosing the wine without asking her opinion will meet her yearnings for old-fashioned romance or strike her as boorish and macho.”

Had a 30 yo with a kid who is fucking a married guy get pissed when I referred to women with kids out of wedlock as slutty whores. ROFL.

Art Deco: “Dalrock, there was no feminist agitprop machine in 1932, nor in 1942, nor in 1952, nor in 1962.”

So women’s suffrage, prohibition and other mainly female movements didn’t happen until the 1970s? What a revelation. Those poor, poor women; they unknowingly suffered persecution and discrimination for even longer than they were aware of.

My sister was a charge nurse for the birthing and baby ward at a major hospital for years. She stated to me that the ‘father’ was nothing of the kind in 15% of all babies that passed through her department. She had determined this by blood type, this was before DNA testing was available. Understand that the actual rate had to be higher, since this was just by blood type incompatibility, no other criteria used.

Read the article and a number of people were interviewed, 2 were men.
A possible third man but they had a name i’ve never seen or heard before so it could be for either gender.

– One woman says that men may convince themselves that dating is passe because they can’t afford it, which is hilarious because in the same breathe she acknowledges that woman are coming up in the world financially.
– Another woman says that young men who don’t have experience with traditional dating go about it in a different.
– A Man says that men are reluctant to go on dating because they tend in end in them getting married.
– Writer says that even with ingrained ambivalence about gender roles some woman are refusing any less them traditional dating.
A woman doesn’t put up with anything less, saying that if a man really her he’s gotta put in some effort.

Even with a few Inklings that the new form of dating is harmfully to both genders, the writer and the people he talked to in the end look down upon dating nowadays because men aren’t courting woman.
Funny how the traditional things that are still being promoted (Courting, Chivalry) are things that solely benefit woman.

I feel compelled to respond to Spacetraveller at 03.59 where she wonders why (if I have this correct) it is not possible to prosecute females for paternity fraud, that is to say having a child with someone other than the husband and then making the husband responsible. The position in English law, is, I have always understood, simply this: that the husband is responsible for the wife and any children that she may have – and that includes children brought to the marriage from any earlier family including any illegitimate children so brought. Of course usually by the time the husband finds out that a child is not biologically his, – if ever – it is too late, because the child is already a child of the family. Of course some husbands revel in this – my own father always insisted that I was in fact the offspring of the then Lord Gosham (an acquaintance of my mothers – which probably accounts for my blue blood). That I am afraid is the law.

Thanks for the explanation!
Whilst I can only reply ‘too bad’, I also wonder why there was no counter-law (made up word, I hope the meaning is clear enough!) made to protect a man should a woman fall foul of this law.

I suspect that like much of the now antiquated English laws, it was just never thought possible (at that time) that a woman would do such a thing, much like the reason lesbianism is not a crime in the UK (but male homosexuality is – was?) is simply because Queen Victoria did not believe that a woman could be homosexual, so she didn’t find a need to agree to the bill being passed.

Perhaps time to change the laws in light of um, new evidence?

PS: I hope sincerely that your father was having a lark, and that your mother knew that, lol.

The common law & US law up until the 1960s was really more concerned about making sure a child had “a father”. Until 1962, a “bastard” child had no rights to their biological father’s estate, in the USA. (If you ever see “acknowledged children” in older text, that’s why) So, you have laws that a Husband is the legal “father” of all children born to his wife during their marriage, regardless of consequences. Being a “bastard child” used to mean an end to pretty much any chance in life.

But, before the Progressive era kicked off, a man still also had explicit authority over his family, so the reasoning made sense. It really doesn’t now. Especially with both “bastard’s rights” and enforced Child Support, the “biological father” is actually quite important. (Further, as genetic disease understanding becomes more common)

I believe the explanation as to why the English law is the way it is is really rather simple: caveat emptor! (buyer beware) in other words if you marry a woman who already has children or who is unfaithful then that is your bad luck. There is also a matter of practicality, that the state (notwithstanding The Poor Law) does not want to be burdened with the repsonsibility for children – for in the main, a woman with a brood of children is and was less likely to be able to earn sufficient to feed, cloth and house them. I thus do not see the law as inherently misandrist, but merely practical.

Whether the law is now outdated is another matter, but that is ho9w it has been in England since time immemorial.

ps I always assumed that my father was serious, and my gf does say my looks are aristocratic, but I guess I will never know. Either way my mother had a son (so she was happy) albeit conceived out of wedlock, and (her great fear) was that had my father not married her, I would – surely – have been sent to the orphanage.

Well, yes, I see the reasoning for the law. I agree a child should not be made to suffer because his mother was dishonourable. You explain it well.
Unfortunate that a fellow victim (i.e. the non-father) is made to pay for the sins of the mother.

“But, before the Progressive era kicked off, a man still also had explicit authority over his family, so the reasoning made sense.”

Absolutely. This is where women today can reclaim the ‘wife skills’ of old and make it all better again.
I am a great fan of this idea, which I think trumps even a change of the laws.
We had this debate over at my blog a few months ago.
In the end we all decided that despite the laws, it is up to individuals to simply do the right thing…

@ Opus,

“There is also a matter of practicality, that the state (notwithstanding The Poor Law) does not want to be burdened with the repsonsibility for children…”

Ah! Interesting how the state ended up with this very scenario in the end…

So women’s suffrage, prohibition and other mainly female movements didn’t happen until the 1970s? What a revelation. Those poor, poor women; they unknowingly suffered persecution and discrimination for even longer than they were aware of.

There was certainly political activity by women, though agitation on the subject of ‘women’s issues’ was exceeding unusual between 1920 and 1963. (And, by the way, prohibition and women’s sufferage were enacted by supermajorities of legislatures which were almost exclusively male). What you did not have was a network of journalists, academics, creative writers, and advocacy groups promoting social myths of the type with which we are familiar. Betty Friedan was strictly a labor journalist prior to 1963 (and her early feminist writings spoke to problems experienced only by haut bourgeois women like herself). The National Organization for Women was founded in 1966. Ms. magazine was founded in 1971; Gloria Steinem was an established leftoid journalist prior to that date, but her writings manifested no particular interest in ‘women’s issues’. Misapplication of the 14th Amendment to annul legislation which recognized differences between men and women occurred after 1972, as did the lawyer’s apologia for same. There was no such ‘academic’ ‘discipline’ as ‘women’s studies’ until after 1970.

Amelia Earhart the celebrity was not the creation of a subcultural feminist nexus. The ordinary run of newspapers and radio broadcasters, whose reporters were predominantly male and whose editors were predominantly male and Republican, promoted Amelia Earhart’s career. Her husband, who came out of the publishing business, was an accomplished promoter, which may explain why she got the attention that might otherwise have gone to one of her peers in the 99s.

What exactly did she do which was so extraordinary? She was a media fabrication from the beginning. Her 1932 Newfoundland to Northern Ireland solo flight which won her the Distinguished Flying Cross was of a comparable route taken by Alcock and Brown in 1919 in an open cockpit WWI bomber (much shorter than Lindbergh’s 1927 NY to Paris flight). She made this flight in a plane which a year earlier two men had used to fly around the world. The only thing extraordinary about the flight was the pilot’s lack of a penis. If I’m wrong, tell me what else would have us even discussing it nearly 100 years later.

Dalrock, anyone flying planes long distances in 1932 was doing something extraordinary, whether it was Lindburgh, or Earhart, or Jacqueline Cochran. That Earhart was 2d echelon rather than 1st echelon is not that important. Exhibition flying was a species of the entertainment business. It has more operational measures of competence than the cinema, to be sure. Audiences fixated on Earhart rather than someone else, just as they fixated on Shirley Temple rather than Jane Withers and just as they fixated on Billie Jean King and not Margaret Court. Celebrity is a funny thing, often inexplicable. It pissed off one or more of her contemporaries in the 99s, who thought they were better at what they did than was she. It does not mean that her activities were without value or that she manifests some sort of social or cultural problem.

He did nothing of the kind. He took precisely what you said in response to what others had said and laid it out in one place. Adding the remarks to which you were responding would not have qualified or amended the meaning of your remarks one bit. You said these things, sister. Own it or re-work your argument.

@deti- “The “Let them pay child support” argument is also insidious because it suggests that money is the primary, or even the sole, contribution a father makes to the well-being of a child. There is no consideration given to the father’s role as protector, example-setter, enforcer and leader.”

I agree with you about the importance of fathers. The money is important obviously as poverty is detrimental to child outcomes, but there is no substitute for the father’s daily presence in his children’s lives.

There is an awful lot of verbiage in your posts. As far as I can discern, you seem to be arguing that women tend to take more leave time than men in medicine and paramedical trades, so allowing women entry to medical schools or schools of pharmacy is socially inefficient. I think ascertaining the effect of the changes in the sex ratio in particular occupations would require an involved econometric study of the relevant labor pools, most particularly if it is to be used as fodder for regulations debarring entry into particular trades. Gotta way’s to go.

As far as I can discern, you seem to be arguing that women tend to take more leave time than men in medicine and paramedical trades, so allowing women entry to medical schools or schools of pharmacy is socially inefficient. I think ascertaining the effect of the changes in the sex ratio in particular occupations would require an involved econometric study of the relevant labor pools, most particularly if it is to be used as fodder for regulations debarring entry into particular trades. Gotta way’s to go.

I can’t speak for MaMu1977, but I think there is a valid concern not that there are too many women practicing medicine, but that statistically the med school seats going to women aren’t getting the bang for the buck productivity wise that seats going to men are. The NYT ran an op ed a while back by a female doctor who made the same case. The answer to this isn’t to bar entry to women, but we should find a way to ensure that scarce doctor training resources are allocated efficiently.

Students who aspire to go to medical school should think about the consequences if they decide to work part time or leave clinical medicine. It’s fair to ask them — women especially — to consider the conflicting demands that medicine and parenthood make before they accept (and deny to others) sought-after positions in medical school and residency. They must understand that medical education is a privilege, not an entitlement, and it confers a real moral obligation to serve.

Dalrock, anyone flying planes long distances in 1932 was doing something extraordinary, whether it was Lindburgh, or Earhart, or Jacqueline Cochran. That Earhart was 2d echelon rather than 1st echelon is not that important. Exhibition flying was a species of the entertainment business. It has more operational measures of competence than the cinema, to be sure. Audiences fixated on Earhart rather than someone else, just as they fixated on Shirley Temple rather than Jane Withers and just as they fixated on Billie Jean King and not Margaret Court. Celebrity is a funny thing, often inexplicable. It pissed off one or more of her contemporaries in the 99s, who thought they were better at what they did than was she. It does not mean that her activities were without value or that she manifests some sort of social or cultural problem.

I don’t think you can say that her celebrity is inexplicable, and that the public simply fixated on her “exhibition flying” rather than another woman’s due to luck of the draw. I don’t understand how you get past the fact that she became an instant national hero not for any flying she did, but for being a passenger while a man flew her across the Atlantic. Again, this is what earned her the media nicknames “Lady Lindy”, and “Queen of the Air”. This is the reason she received a ticker tape parade and was invited to the White House. We know exactly why she was famous. She famously allowed a man to fly her across the Atlantic.

Folks, it’s of course the case that most women are not going to agree about paternity fraud, because this is an issue that has no positive benefit for women at all — it’s all downside for women. Paternity testing as a requirement for naming a father on a birth certificate (something which a woman can do unilaterally in many places) has obviously no benefit at all for any specific woman, and certainly not for women in general. It’s only detrimental, because in the small number of cases where the woman is naming someone other than the bio dad on the certificate, this kind of requirement would prevent her from doing that, and that’s a net negative for women in terms of providing them with options as to how to manage the raising of children they bear, of whichever father. There is simply no upside for women and only downside, so this issue is never going to get broad female support — it’s too at odds with a visceral option all women have, and have always had (because scientific paternity testing, like reliable birth control, is a product of modern medicine and we did not evolve based around it) as one part of the genetic-passing-on strategy of the female sex as a whole.

There isn’t any other male-female issue that is as zero-sum at this one. Even in areas like no-fault divorce law, which is obviously slanted toward the prerogatives of the female sex, there are some women who feel that the system is unjust (gwen, upthread, is one of them), perhaps because their husband was able to no-fault divorce *them* after he misbehaved. But cuckolding/paternity fraud is a completely zero-sum issue with only negative impacts on women — which means that a woman would only support it out of abstract principles of fairness — which is going to be very, very uncommon in the context of issues pertaining to the relationship between men and women.

It may have sounded like an ‘either/or’ strategy was being presented here.
Not so.
On that thread, both changing laws and people just showing some good old fashioned rectitude were argued.
It became quickly clear (as several people pointed out) that changing the law is still not enough.
I have sympathy with that view.

Did you ever see the film ‘Guess who’s coming to dinner?’
I am reminded of a scene towards the end, where the father of John Prenctice is attempting to knock some sense into his son. When John declares to his father that he hoped his life with (white) Joanna would turn out alright because he was sure the racism laws would change sometime soon, his father says to hm (I paraphrase), ‘Son, it doesn’t matter how much they change the laws. If people are going to hate seeing you, a black man, with a white woman, they are going to hate that. For this to change, you will need to change hearts, not the law.’

Both strategies would be ideal, of course.
But tell me, wouldn’t it be something to behold if despite the temptation to defraud a man (because the law allows her to), a woman on the brink of divorce said to herself, No, I don’t follow the dumb crowd and demand the highest possible payout. I come to an arrangement with the ex about what is a fair settlement for the benefit of our children. I do the right thing.
And for sure, she also knows with total certainty that all the said children are genetically related to the soon-to-be-ex.

Or better yet, she seeks to do her best to self-examine as to if she contributed to the breakdown of her marriage, to the best of her ability, even if he won’t, before calling time on it.

but we should find a way to ensure that scarce doctor training resources are allocated efficiently.

Giving mulligans to what Thomas Sowell called ‘mascot groups’ is bad policy, and should stop (and if the statistics on vet school admissions cited above are actually that, I would wager that is occurring). The problem is, it is very difficult for a board of admissions examiners to ascertain (of a 23 year old applicant) what the course of her life is going to be as far as marriage, child-rearing and various other sorts of preferences. They can assess her observable academic competence and perhaps screen for manifest problems in behavior or temperament, but that’s about it. The problem is redoubled if you are considering applicants to pharmacy programs, who are commonly 17 or 18. My internist took early retirement in 2008, at the age of 54. She did so due to medical problems that made it inadvisable to continue with a demanding line of work. It is difficult to see how the people assessing her medical school application in 1977 were going to figure that one out antecedently.

I don’t understand how you get past the fact that she became an instant national hero not for any flying she did, but for being a passenger while a man flew her across the Atlantic. Again, this is what earned her the media nicknames “Lady Lindy”, and “Queen of the Air”. This is the reason she received a ticker tape parade and was invited to the White House. We know exactly why she was famous. She famously allowed a man to fly her across the Atlantic.

Easy. She lived 30 years of her life before that and 9 years after. You can say the hoopla was silly, but other people created the hoopla. She and G.P. Putnam merely exploited it. She was a founding member of the international association of women pilots and a competitor, exhibitor, and teacher for years afterward, including flying routes that no one flew before she did. She was not ‘playing’ at flying planes. She was flying planes. She died attempting to do something no one had done before: circumnavigate the globe using an equatorial route, and made it about 85% of the way. It is certainly conceivable that her death was due to a deficiency of technical knowledge. It is also conceivable that it was due to problems that would have bedeviled anyone or due to luck of the draw (look up “Jacob Veldhuizen van Zanten” if you want an education in the disasters that even the best pilots can perpetrate). I cannot see your point in beating up on Amelia Earhart 75 years after her death except as a complaint about the celebrity culture. It really does not mean much in assessing what has gone awry between men and women in the last 50 years. She was a novelty of her time, hence the attention.

You want pure media nonsense, Amelia Earhart is not your gal. Rosa Parks, a resident of Montgomery, Ala unremarkable except for her being an officer of the local NAACP would be an example. Designated victims like Ryan White or Kimberly Bergalis would be examples. These were ordinary people just getting through life (such as it was) that came to be fodder for newspaper articles and hagiographies. Amelia Earhart was decidedly non-ordinary.

Analogous media blather that is meant to move the needle on public opinion and public policy (and the case of Pvt. Jessica Lynch would be one in point) is a problem. All that is rather remote from Amelia Earhart and her life and times.

@ spacetraveller – “Both strategies would be ideal, of course.
But tell me, wouldn’t it be something to behold if despite the temptation to defraud a man (because the law allows her to), a woman on the brink of divorce said to herself, No, I don’t follow the dumb crowd and demand the highest possible payout. I come to an arrangement with the ex about what is a fair settlement for the benefit of our children. I do the right thing.
And for sure, she also knows with total certainty that all the said children are genetically related to the soon-to-be-ex.”

Plenty of couples come to agreements about child support and custody without the help of the family court system. The amounts of child support paid in these instances is often greater than the amounts that would be legally required. Despite manosphere myths where people who make 30k a year are routinely ordered to pay 2k a month in child support, most child support payments aren’t all that much.

T – “Paternity fraud is a horrible thing. I just don’t think that there is a way to successfully prosecute it most of the time.”

Prosecutions are not the best of all possible “end-games” for paternity fraud. The real goal should be to indemnify duped men against further financial loss due to the fraud propagated upon them; at to possible force repayment of some portion of that which he has been defrauded of.

One of your problem’s in arguing with men on this forum id that we are very well informed. We have collectively done our research, and we are thus immune to your BS. I cannot tell you how many men here already knew that systematic studies indicate a rate of nearly 10% paternity fraud, with rates much higher in lower SES.

Most men here also already know that there is a 2-limit on the time within which a man can discover paternity fraud and seek to be legally indemnified. Contrast that with the fact that there is no comparable statute of limitation on when a woman can go after a man for child support. Woman can, and do, seek back-support even after their children have become adults [infamously, we have the example of the woman trying to sue Keanu Reeves for millions in back support for her 4 ADULT children. Reeves had to prove, via DNA, that he was not the father, of her suit would have been moved forward. And BTW, she, not the children (who are supposedly the ones entitled to the support, in legal theory) would have been the one to have received millions had he been the father of the children already raised and provided for by another man].

Your lack of basic knowledge on so many of these issues leaves me feeling embarrassed for you.

But, regardless, if a law were to be suggested to indemnify men duped into paternity fraud, you’d line up immediately with the sisterhood of Team Woman to argue about the “Best interest of the Child” and the childs (supposed) “right to support” to keep duped men of the financial hook – even when those men, who may have a deep bound with that child have no legal standing to even ask for shared custody of the child, because, afterall, they are not the child’s parent.

But, while it likely slip your limits of comprehension, such children do have a biological father. What needs to happen is that women who are proven to have defrauded a man into forced child support need to be forced to go into a court room and name the real father if they wish to have the court order child support (and they need to be limited on the number of men who they can target, as well as be forced to pay for the DNA testing that would be required to assign paternity).

T, foot fully inserted into mouth – ”Plenty of couples come to agreements about child support and custody without the help of the family court system. The amounts of child support paid in these instances is often greater than the amounts that would be legally required. “

And, not one such agreement is legally binding. A woman can, at any time, go to court seeking court ordered support. And, if the man who has been paying (above and beyond) cannot prove that he has been paying, the court will not recognize that he has paid, and he will be made fully responsible for back-support for the time he has already paid.

In most states, c/s is a fixed percentage of the payor’s income — that is, as a practical matter, how the “income share method” (which is the most common one in use) works.

Examples, assuming the state in question determines “need” to be 15% of the couple’s total pretax income (states have different percentages by formula, I’m using 15% as a round number for purposes of these examples).

Example One.
Total parental income = 100k, H earns 70k, W earns 30k.
Total need is 15% of 100k, or 15k. H has 70% of the total parental income, so he pays 70% of the 15k, which is 10,500, and W “bears” the remaining 4,500k. That 10.5k that H pays is 15% of his pretax income.

Example Two.
Total parental income = 100k. H earns 30k, W earns 70k.
Total need is the same, 15k (15% of total parental income). H has 30% of total parental income, so he pays 30% of the 15k, which is 4,500, while W “bears” the remaining 10.5k. That 4.5k that H pays to W is 15% of his pretax income.

Example Three.
Total parental income = 150k. H earns 75k, W earns 75k.
Total need is 15% of 150k, or 22,500. H has 50% of total parental income, so H pays 50% of the 22.5k, or 11,250 to W. That 11.25k that H pays to W is 15% of his pretax income.

Example Four.
Total parental income = 50k. H earns 30k, W earns 20k.
Total need is 15% of 50k, or 7500. H has 60% of pretax income, so H pays 60% of the 7500, or 4500, to W. That 4.5k that H pays to W is … you guessed it, 15% of his pretax income.

There are other things that are added into c/s in addition to the “base calculation”, like medical expenses and any private schooling, child care expenses and so on, which are mostly broken down according to the same income share method, but the base calculation operates as a flat tax on income for the payor spouse, which is typically a guy. He pays the same amount of his income, percentage-wise, whether he earns more or less or is rich or poor — it’s a flat tax. It isn’t *always* a guy (I know a female lawyer colleague of mine — former colleague actually — who was a payor spouse because she didn’t want custody and instead wanted to spend more time on her career, which she did, but she used to complain about paying that money to her ex-husband and him spending it on his GF), but it’s almost always a guy unless, as in the case of my parenthetical, the mother doesn’t want it to be.

“Folks, it’s of course the case that most women are not going to agree about paternity fraud, because this is an issue that has no positive benefit for women at all — it’s all downside for women.”

Anything that discourages men from investing resources in women – such as the continuing lack of legal protection from paternity fraud – is ultimately a net negative for women. Then again, women don’t understand cause and effect, as our old pal TFH has explained a number of times. Women adamantly refuse to differentiate themselves from the predatory women who mistreat and defraud men, even though the resulting male indifference and revulsion ultimately harms women as a whole. But again, it’s their fault.

“Plenty of couples come to agreements about child support and custody without the help of the family court system.”

Exactly.
This is precisely my point. If some women and men can manage this, why can’t the rest?
What’s so different about those who do this so successfully?
Yes. Rectitude of character, that’s what.

This side debate about female doctors started by MaMu1977 is very interesting.

“Students who aspire to go to medical school should think about the consequences if they decide to work part time or leave clinical medicine. It’s fair to ask them — women especially — to consider the conflicting demands that medicine and parenthood make before they accept (and deny to others) sought-after positions in medical school and residency.”

In Britain, choosing ANY career starts at age 16. (I am not sure about the system in the US, but I guess it is roughly the same age). In the UK, by age 16, you need to know what subjects you will do in the next two years that take you to University. Doctors qualify at age 22, 23.

So a girl with aspirations to be a doctor at 16 is being asked to project rather far into the future…At that age, most girls may not even know their own feelings about marriage, kids, etc.
Both boys and girls are just trying to get the best grades they can at school. And the better the grades, the higher their chances of getting into top careers.

That a woman takes time out to have children causes problems at the workplace, yes.
But is it better if she never had an education (which is expensive) and the career in the first place?
I honestly don’t think so.
But I am willing to be dissuaded from this view if someone presents a better alternative.

One of the sources of my inability to take a definitive position on this:
Commenter Gwen, despite having had a well-paying job before having children, was ‘handicapped’ financially after her divorce, she tells us.

I imagine that when her kids are grown up and no longer need her to be at home, she will be in a position to go back to work.
A woman who never learned a trade may need to be looked after for life by her ex-husband, or may be more dependent on the state, no?
I am sure neither of these options is palatable to anyone here.

It doesn’t have to be medicine. Any trade a woman learns (whilst she can, i.e. when not yet a mother) is a good thing, no?

‘The “best interests of the child” doctrine probably is a product of the Progressive Era, and thus the idea likely was bubbling in the urban, upper middle class in the 1880′s to 1890′s. Note that this doctrine was replaced in the 1970′s by the “tender years” doctrine, which marginalizes fathers even more.’

As far as I can tell, the Tender Years Doctrine has been gaining acceptance since the end of the 19th Century. It actually precedes feminism and is a bastardization of patriarchal norms.

All the talk about the “interests of the child” is nothing but pure BS, a classic example of the feminine imperative put into practice. Feminists have been justifying their demands for legal reform in the name of the “children’s best interests”, but interestingly enough, the general condition of children has been gradually worsening in the West as feminism has gained more and more ground. A growing proportion of children are stuck in fatherless homes, ending up in prison or hooked on prescription drugs, abused by their mothers and her thug lovers and stepfathers, their quality of education and health is generally poorer etc. Then again, none of this is surprising – such is the usual environment in any matriarchy.

The interests of children are only protected when society basically forces all parents to regard it as their moral duty to provide the best possible upbringing to their children. That means husbands and wives swallowing their pride and staying together in unhappy marriages for the sake of the children. That means both fathers and mothers being involved in their children’s lives as much as possible. But feminism opposes all of that. And yet they talk of the best interests of the children. My ass.

The Elusive Wife appears to support men’s issues, but really, those more jaded and experienced within “The Movement” will recognize that the Elusive Wife is concerned about men mainly because she is scared shitless of men waking up to the scam. She wants men to return to their masculine role of pandering to women’s every whim, slaving away like a mindless drone for her and her children. It is noteworthy that the Elusive Wife’s husband never comes online, gushing about his wonderful life with his wonderful wife. Nope, only she speaks of how blissfully contented her husband is with her. He smartly (or cowardly) remains silent.

Funny how it’s interests aren’t in play when mommy walks into the clinic..

Interests of the child is a grand take on the whole ‘it takes a village to rise a child’ meme. Course, back then we actually lived in villages where the social order of the small community really was at stake because you knew all your neighbors and required each other for actual survival.

Nowadays, the village includes your entire country, and i am required to pay taxes here in Ontario to pay to help subsidize some womans choice to be a single teen mom out west in British Columbia because it’s in the best interest of the child and im part of the global village.

(SELF) described “Thinking Housewife” Laura Wood once claimed to have mentioned to her husband something about some matter of importance to MAdrosphere men, to which, she claims, he simply retorted that any man who would even be concerned was a pathetic loser, not worthy to call himself a man. By L. Woods own account he seems not to have taken even one second of thoughtful reflection before coming that his conclusion.

Like the majority of “Orthosphereans”, he was most comfortable knowing nothing about men in the MAndrosphere, nor anything of the issues; and simply supposing that his faulty assumptions were correct, and that there was no need to consider anything further.

MaMu is loyal to his “profession”. And if some people gotta die cause of it, well then, some people gotta die!
Second: there is a limited amount of space for training. Again, to put it bluntly, there are only *so many* slots for prospective medical students in America. As mentioned above, if American medical schools can pump out about 100,000 per decade

Why is there only a “limited amount of slots for training”? Why is this presented by MaMu as an unalterable fact? Couldn’t a new medical school be opened? Oh, wait, no. That would increase SUPPLY. And SUPPLY would lower prices. So let’s have the Federal Government prevent the opening of medical schools for 30+ years! And when the situation gets so bad that the privileged doctors don’t even want to work more for stupid high pay, we’ll import foreign doctors rather than build new schools! And finally, when the system is straining on the edges of sanity(around 2010)… we’ll open a few schools because doctor-man has no choice. Now, has the excessive and artificial limiting of supply of HEALTH CARE led to deaths?

OF COURSE IT HAS! PILES AND PILES OF BODIES! But when you get into a field to SAVE LIVES, like most doctors do, and believe me, I know that, doing the best job they can, sometimes a lot of people have to die so you can get more money cause you like money.

Is America sick beyond saving? Is it a good idea to leave RIGHT NOW? Yes. It. Is.

They are going to kick off Austerity this year. I give it this year till things explode.

Whatever – “Why is there only a “limited amount of slots for training”? Why is this presented by MaMu as an unalterable fact?”

In any given year, there are a specific number of slots, in extant medical schools, which dictate the number of students who matriculate. In that regard, it would be hard to argue it as anything other than an unalterable fact.

That new schools could be built/opened does not change the fact that the number of slots would still be limited, although at an increased number.

Here we go again. “Game is a way to take control of the situation.” Yes, giving a woman whatever she wants sure is taking control. “She wants me to be aloof, I’ll be aloof. She wants me to respond to her text, I’d better respond. Now she doesn’t want me to respond, so I’d better not.” Way to be in control!

slwerner can’t handle the truth:
In any given year, there are a specific number of slots, in extant medical schools, which dictate the number of students who matriculate. In that regard, it would be hard to argue it as anything other than an unalterable fact.

That new schools could be built/opened does not change the fact that the number of slots would still be limited, although at an increased number.

The slots will still be limited! Unless another school was built! But, oh wait, then the number of slots would then be limited to that newer, higher number! Until another school is built!

I bet it was blacks who ACTUALLY are responsible. What do you think? Blacks did it? Using up all that healthcare with their blackness? Maybe the poor uninsured?

I think we can all agree to blame them for MaMu and his buddies behavior.

Whatever – ” slwerner can’t handle the truth. I bet it was blacks who ACTUALLY are responsible. I think we can all agree to blame them for MaMu and his buddies behavior.”

I have no idea what you are trying to say in any of this. Are you actually a racist, or are you just suggesting in a back-handed manner that those who disagree with you are?

Perhaps you are ignorant of how medical schools work? There is a substantial accreditation process which is prohibitive to opening new schools. And while not an absolute barrier, the AMA would still be able to limit the number of new schools, and the number of slots for which they would be given accreditation – just as they now govern the number of slots any given accredited school can provide.

Perhaps you also missed the salient point of MaMu’s argument?

If there are a limited number of new entrants into a profession, regulated by the “guardians” of that profession; and if that profession deliberately seeks to keep it number of practicing members to a number only minimally sufficient to meet consumer need (so as to limit competition), then it would be best to carefully consider that long-term ability and desire of those permitted into that profession to continue to practice full-time, and continuously over the life-time of their membership.

It has been easily observed that the rate at which women leave the medical profession (either temporarily or permanently) prior to normal retirement age, as well as the tendency towards working more limited schedules, is much higher than for male doctors.

[But, perhaps this is just some more racism to you?]

Thus, in that any slot given to a woman necessarily precludes a man from taking that slot (it’s pretty simple logic – I do hope you can follow it) it therefore increases the likelihood that out of the total number of doctors coming out of the collective medical programs they will (collectively) practice fewer hours and fewer years of medicine (again, it seems simple logic to follow).

Therefore, if there is a concern as to the number of doctors practicing at any given time, and a concern about the number of hours being devoted to the practice on a daily basis, then it would be logical to opt to select male applicants over female applicants of the same (or, in the case of de facto affirmative action being applied. lesser) qualifications.

Hopefully I haven’t been to racist for your tastes, and you were able to follow my explanation.

number of practicing members to a number only minimally sufficient to meet consumer need

I never said it was “minimally sufficient”. Everyone who knows anything about the situation(including MaMu) knows that it is grossly and absurdly insufficient. That is why huge, huge numbers of foreign doctors are imported. It is quite clearly NOT sufficient in the least. It is this kind of continually dishonesty that has lead me to just hitting you vermin on the head as hard as I can. It’s not like you will ADMIT to anything, ever. And yes, MaMu is responsible. He is a doctor, he knows the score, he lies about how “slots are limited”. He could say “we need to open more schools”. But instead chooses to have nonsense arguments about “not letting women be doctors” cause “we can’t have more slots cause I like MONEY”.

If there are a limited number of new entrants into a profession, regulated by the “guardians” of that profession; and if that profession deliberately seeks to keep it number of practicing members to a number only minimally sufficient to meet consumer need (so as to limit competition), then it would be best to carefully consider that long-term ability and desire of those permitted into that profession to continue to practice full-time, and continuously over the life-time of their membership.

Actually, that point of view is completely insane. I will leave it to the readers to attempt to find the reason. A reason only slightly more complex than 1+1=2.

Women should choose a career or a family, they can’t have both without society picking up the slack.

I think this is true depending on the definition of “career”, and in this case I think there is room for reasonable people to disagree on where to draw the line. In general the issue isn’t women going to college and/or working in professions. The issues (at least for me) are obtaining a balance of costs when allocating scarce resources, as well as how the woman approaches it. Aside from the waste of for example represented by the doctor shortage in the article I linked to above, there is also the problem of the cultural attack on women who make marriage and family a priority. We have become incredibly snobbish against women who don’t get the feminist merit badge, and this is very unfair to large numbers of women.

whatever – ”I will leave it to the readers to attempt to find the reason.”

Given the higher levels of intelligence and educational achievement within the MAndrosphere, there seems little else to say other than, “advantage mine”.

whatever – ” And yes, MaMu is responsible. He is a doctor, he knows the score, he lies about how “slots are limited”. He could say “we need to open more schools”.

Gee, I must have missed it. Could you direct me to the place where he argues against increasing the number of slots?

As a factual matter, for whatever conspiratorial reason it may be due to, there are a limited number of slots for any given year.

I’m sure that if it were only a matter of declaring them to be so, the University of Phoenix would already have 100 medical schools through the US. I don’t see anyone arguing that there isn’t a need for more med students so as to increase the number of doctors. But there are practical concerns which limit the rate of growth (even beyond a conspiracy to do so).

Also, how is it that it can be known that the ”situation” is ”grossly and absurdly insufficient”*. I’m not arguing that there isn’t a shortage of doctors (available) overall, nor that in 15 years that shortage may amount to 150,000. I just have to wonder how much of the current shortfall is specifically due to doctors (typically woman doctors) not practicing to the fullest possible extent.

If the lack of practicing medicine to the fullest extent by those trained and qualified to do so is a significant part of the problem, then this would be in solid support of the argument against women being given preference over men in selection for matriculation.

*Personally, whenever I of a member of my family has required medical attention, it has been readily available to us. In fact, my doctor sends me reminders to (please) come in for exams. Hum? I wonder if that has something to do with my paying handsomely for full medical coverage which assures doctors and other medical professionals that they will actually be paid for treating me and mine?

“Folks, it’s of course the case that most women are not going to agree about paternity fraud, because this is an issue that has no positive benefit for women at all — it’s all downside for women.”

I’m rejoining this thread late and maybe someone has already said this. But: The only real upside for a woman is that the chaste, faithful woman has nothing to fear from paternity testing. The husband/paramour’s paternity is confirmed and all can rest easy knowing the child’s true parentage. The wife is shown to have been chaste and faithful, at least with regard to the child’s paternity.

““Folks, it’s of course the case that most women are not going to agree about paternity fraud, because this is an issue that has no positive benefit for women at all — it’s all downside for women.””

This would be issue numero uno if woman, when the time came to have sex with intent to make a baby were forced to do it in the dark with either their husband, or with Danny DeVito.. and the outcome was based on someone rolling a 10 sided dice in which landing on 1, 2 or 3 meant that Danny would be getting to blow his nut inside her without her knowing it.

The discussion about medical training would benefit from some clarity.

1. Occupational certification and accreditation restricts entry, but even apart from that manpower devoted to the training of physicians and surgeons is manpower not devoted to other tasks. The same applies to the plant and equipment so devoted, and any other factor of production you can consider. There is some theoretical point where it does not advance the common good to devote more resources to medical training.

2. Much has been made of a posited tendency of female physicians and surgeons to apply more often for leaves of absence and retire earlier. We might stipulate that for the moment (or we might not). This tendency is conceived of as an exogenous variable.

3. We posit further that their are productivity losses from a decline in the shelf-life of a trained physician, surgeon, or psychiatrist, which is to say that it is our understanding that physicians who take leave or retire earlier will be replaced by neophyte physicians and physicians-in-training who accomplish less with their time (given their salaries). In doing so, we are also positing that the propensity to take leave time or retire earlier does not co-vary with productivity much, which is to say that the retiring doctors are roughly comparable to peers who do not retire. (In the case of my internist, this was not so).

4. We posit further that the productivity losses are large enough to detect and justify corrective action.

5. We posit that we can discern reliable means to contain these losses by policies implemented at the point aspirants are recruited to enter medical training.

I just do not think you all are going to get to the other side of the canyon with this one.

“In a 2006 survey by the American Medical Association and the Association of American Medical Colleges, even full-time female doctors reported working on average 4.5 fewer hours each week and seeing fewer patients than their male colleagues. The American Academy of Pediatrics estimates that 71 percent of female pediatricians take extended leave at some point — five times higher than the percentage for male pediatricians.”

Speaking of those who really should have read the article before wading in, it seems the whatever has already slunked off. Too bad. I was anticipating her challenging the notion that there were practical restrictions on increasing the number of med students.

Those of you who did read it no doubt know that I was going to quote this back to her when she protested:

“In 1997, Congress imposed a cap on how many medical residencies the government could subsidize as part of the Balanced Budget Act. Last year, the Senate failed to pass an amendment to the health care bill that would have created thousands of new residency positions. Even if American medical schools could double their graduating classes, there wouldn’t be additional residency positions for the new doctors. Federal and state financing to expand medical education will be hard to find in today’s economic and political climate.”

But, of course, that would have presupposed that she understood that residency was an essential step between med student and licensed practicing doctor.

there is also the problem of the cultural attack on women who make marriage and family a priority. We have become incredibly snobbish against women who don’t get the feminist merit badge, and this is very unfair to large numbers of women.

1. Agrarian life is disappearing. Fewer than 2% of all households make their living from agriculture (vs. around 20% in 1930). The busy and diversely-skilled farm wife is now quite an unusual sort.

2. The total fertility rate is considerably lower than it was during the suburban efflorescence after the 2d World War. It went from about 3.5 children per mother per lifetime to 2.1 children. What this means is that the number of women toward the right side of the bell curve who have pre-adolescent children at home for periods exceeding 15 years or more has declined precipitously.

3. Even under the ancien regime, labor force participation rates by women were considerable. In 1930, about a quarter of the workforce was female; in 1957, about a third was female. These metrics would not include farm wives, who are fully occupied.

4. All this being the case, unalloyed devotion to housework and to volunteer endeavours is likely to repair to discrete periods in the lives of most women. We have to ask whether the common good is enhanced by ever more meticulous devotion to household tasks or wage employment.

5. Just to re-iterate: salaried employees and f/t proprietors make up about 30% of the workforce. There are people who have careers, people who have trades, and people who have jobs. Those in the last category are modal everywhere except well-heeled suburbs and university towns. With that in mind, one ought to note that careers under discussion (medicine, law) comprehend < 1.5% of the workforce.

“In a 2006 survey by the American Medical Association and the Association of American Medical Colleges, even full-time female doctors reported working on average 4.5 fewer hours each week and seeing fewer patients than their male colleagues. The American Academy of Pediatrics estimates that 71 percent of female pediatricians take extended leave at some point — five times higher than the percentage for male pediatricians.”

And it is your contention that this is not reflected in their compensation? The working physicians I know well tell me the bean-counters in their practices are on their tail about the number of patients they see, whether or not they are permitted to use the transcription service, the alacrity with which they complete their paperwork, &c. Same deal with the nurse practitioners.

Dalrock says:
“Furthermore a man should never be jailed or forced to pay child support for a child he can prove he didn’t father. The man should also have legal recourse against the mother for any financial support he was tricked or legally forced into providing.”
I see a need for “a child he can prove he didn’t *knowingly* father”, or something to that effect. I realize they are a small percentage, but those cases of a woman taking the condom (deliberately worn to prevent pregnancy) to impregnate themselves, or the ridiculous one of a woman taking her boyfriend’s sperm to a fertility clinic are terrible. That loophole could be closed at the same time.

deti says:
“@ Brendan:
“Folks, it’s of course the case that most women are not going to agree about paternity fraud, because this is an issue that has no positive benefit for women at all — it’s all downside for women.”
The only real upside for a woman is that the chaste, faithful woman has nothing to fear from paternity testing…”
There may be no *benefit* for women to accept mandatory paternity testing, but decent women could see the benefits for men and society, and support it for those benefits. Decent women should want to separate themselves from the ones who might commit paternity fraud, and could reasonably not mind the testing which won’t hurt them at all when it can so much benefit men.
Or leave it up the individual – mother’s name automatically goes on the birth certificate. If there is to be a father’s name, then either the mother or (claimed) father must request it, and prove it via testing in order to be listed on the legal document. To avoid future claims, logic could also require the father’s name be added within 6 months of birth (if requested by the mother) or 6 months of knowledge of the child (if requested by the father).
No father on the birth certificate, no permission to claim child support from a non-legally-recognised father.

“In 1997, Congress imposed a cap on how many medical residencies the government could subsidize as part of the Balanced Budget Act. Last year, the Senate failed to pass an amendment to the health care bill that would have created thousands of new residency positions. Even if American medical schools could double their graduating classes, there wouldn’t be additional residency positions for the new doctors. Federal and state financing to expand medical education will be hard to find in today’s economic and political climate.”

You mean the level of federal subsidy is the only determinant of the number of medical residencies there are?

Art Deco – “And it is your contention that this is not reflected in their compensation?”

Where did you get the idea that I was making any such contention?

The “issue” was about the maximization of ROI based on the rates at which women vs men failed to practice to the fullest extent – irrespective of any consideration of compensation received.

It isn’t just being posited that this is happening – it’s being observed and measured. The only thing I speculated on was how much this tendency was contributing to the perceived “doctor shortage”, as in “where there be such a shortfall if female doctors worked as hard and as long as their male counterparts?”

Any woman who KNOWS the man she claims as the father is the only man she has had sex with and is the only man who could possibly be the father should have absolutely NO objection to a paternity test being done on the child. She should welcome the test. She should say “Please, go ahead, do the test. I will not object in any way to your verification of what I know the facts to be.”

Any woman who objects with the “you don’t trust me/you’re accusing me of cheating” canard indicates the man requesting the test has reason to suspect something is up.

The abstract in question is in a database maintained by the National Library of Medicine. The article in question appeared in the medical journal Transplantation. Volume, issue, and page number are noted.

The link you sent me to is a comment in a forum in which the commenter offers an interpretation of a metric offered by the American Association of Blood Banks. That interpretation may or may not be correct. It is the pseudonymous forum participant which offers that interpretation, not the American Association of Blood Banks.

I have rummaged through the PubMed database. There are not many articles on misattributed paternity and most concern medical ethics (disclosure protocols, &c.). This was the one that incorporated an actual survey. Of course, the sample was small and the population of aspirant kidney recipients may be unrepresentative in ways we have not imagined. Just seemed like a more solid piece of data that we have seen here.

That would be a strongly self-selecting group. If your child is having kidney problems and you are thinking about donating one, you would I imagine get a blood test with your local doctor, and it would then never even get to a registry.

They are talking about “a living kidney donor and recipient with a father-child relationship”.

1. What are the social losses attributable to abbreviated careers?
2. Can you measure them with precision?
3. Can you make operational some sort of antidote at the point of entry to medical school? You are either proposing some sort of questionnaire which is valid and reliable for predicting future behavior (and future good health, see my internist) or you are positing some variant of a hire bar. The latter is crude and likely to meet with tremendous resistance. The former is likely no where outside of anyone’s imagination.

The other reason nothing sensible will be done about PF has to do with WTH you’re then supposed to do will all the divorce or single moms, who basically guarantee the lucky guy who gets them that he will be a cuckold.

That women expect this as a matter of course, this interchangeability of fathers in their minds, points to a huge blind spot that they will never grasp but just have to be made to accept as a fact of life. Kinda like how men just have to accept that women PMS.

The PF issue implicitly differentiates between good mothers and bad mothers, which goes against the Motherhood Mystique and the unquestionable Sanctity-of-Motherhood principle, which are at the core of our matriarchy. I don’t think women will voluntarily turn in their Motherhood Cards (actual or potential) when it’s about all they’ve got left.

Art Deco – “The abstract in question is in a database maintained by the National Library of Medicine. The article in question appeared in the medical journal Transplantation. Volume, issue, and page number are noted.”

Yeah. I saw. but what I also saw was a clever little trick to disguise just how prevalent it might actually be. From the abstract:

” In the United States and Canada, the prevalence of father-child living kidney donor-recipient pairs with less than a one-haplotype human leukocyte antigen match (i.e., misattributed paternity) is between 1% and 3%”

I’m rejoining this thread late and maybe someone has already said this. But: The only real upside for a woman is that the chaste, faithful woman has nothing to fear from paternity testing. The husband/paramour’s paternity is confirmed and all can rest easy knowing the child’s true parentage. The wife is shown to have been chaste and faithful, at least with regard to the child’s paternity.

But women don’t generally think or act that way when they feel that something threatens the position of women as a whole in their relationship with men as a whole. That is the nature of the “sisterhood”. Women are competitive with each other and tear each other down in a catty way, but when there is a perceived threat to women coming from men and the male interest, women tend to perceive that viscerally and defend the interests of women. Therefore, while most women do not cuckold their husbands, nevertheless the idea that a system could be set up that would absolutely prevent the whatever-percentage-it-is who does do so from doing so is viscerally rejected by almost all women.

Heck, you’ll find dyed-in-the-wool big government nanny state regulate-everything-more-please women turn into radical libertarians when discussing this issue. It’s quite telling. MPT threatens women as a class on a visceral level — it’s deep programming we’re talking about here, something that is a programmed part of the female mating strategy (Ridley’s “Red Queen” is a good accessible source on this), even if it is not an oft-used one. This is zero-sum gene war between males and females, because when it happens successfully, the man gets no genetic downflow at all, while she gets the male genetic downflow she wants, coupled with the male support for said downflow she wants, just from different men. Again, not a common strategy, but nevertheless a persistent element of the overall strategy on the female side of the fence, really, and one that comes at 100% expense to men and 100% benefit to women as a whole because it gives all of them options, just in case.

Art Deco – “You are either proposing some sort of questionnaire which is valid and reliable for predicting future behavior…”

Again you put words in my mouth…

I stated, quite clearly, that I was speculating that the lost productivity due to the observed and measure tendencies of female doctors to work less might be responsible for some portion of the perceived doctor shortage – openly wondering if that loss might be quite significant; and suggesting that if it were, then it would support the argument (of others) that women should not be given unearned preferences when being considered for medical school (do note, I have never suggested that either no women should be considered, nor that some test be applied to determine the efficacy of any future practice by and applicant. I have only ever stated that it is arguable that no PREFERENCE be given women.)

In the case of father-child matching for kidney donation, it does not seem that the testing is done is not for the purpose of establishing paternity, but rather to determine if an adequate match exists (a father is not necessarily a good match even to his biological children).

That cases wherein there are zero loci-based genetic matches between father and child is only a proxy for actual paternity matching. It’s not even clear that kidney donation matching utilizes the same loci as are used for paternity matching. Thus, it would be hard to argue that the rarity of zero matches in a highly selective and very small population can be used as a reliable measure of mis-assigned paternity in the overall population.

Art Deco – “The transplant surgeons and the editors of Transplantation are in on the scam?”

No.

They are not doing real paternity testing. they are attempting to use the testing they do use, as a proxy for a more rigorous testing of 16 to 25 loci now typically being used for paternity testing – wherein only 4 non-matches (not zero matches) is a solid non-paternity result.

I hope you understand that in the case of the proxy-for-paternity testing you’ve cited that the 1-3% they report represents only cases wherein none of their selected (from donation purposes) loci match are the only ones in which they can absolutely establish non-paternity. the flip side of this is NOT that in 97-98% of cases paternity is positively established (it’s doubtful that they need establish paternity in any case).

Their point was whether or not in the 1-3% of cases wherein there was absolutely no chance that the putative father was the biological father that information should be given as part of the reason why the generous and loving man who believes he is offering a kidney for his child is being rejected as a possible donor.

Agreed, that to virtuous women (i.e. women who have nothing to fear as to the paternity of their child), paternity testing, whilst initially inherently distateful would quickly become something they ‘get over’.
Yes, the only women who would continue to insist it should NOT be done are the ones who have questionable motives against it.

TFH,

If indeed you think the MAJORITY of women will be against paternity testing, (and I have no reason to disbelieve you), then we are indeed now in a position where someone needs to take action and force the issue, rather than leave the issue to flounder.

It looks like we might have no choice in this particular matter if justice is to again reign supreme.
How about resorting to propaganda type campaigns, eg. similar to the anti-smoking or safe sex campaigns in the 80s and 90s? These were successful campaigns, were they not? For the first time since the 40s, people actually cut down on smoking and barrier contraception became popular (um…slight issue with the latter, but let’s not go there right now, lol).

How about (if the government won’t do it) people simply posting short videos on their blogs and other social media explaining why paternity testing for all is a good idea?
These may quickly become ‘mainstream’ and the idea will be suddenly ‘out there’.
There would be the usual noises from opponents, but in the end, persistence will win through.

A good side effect is that it will also provide the perfect opportunity for dishonourable women to ‘out’ themselves because they would be the loudest and longest-duration opponents to the campaign. And the rest of us could just fold our arms and watch…

“Agreed, that to virtuous women (i.e. women who have nothing to fear as to the paternity of their child), paternity testing, whilst initially inherently distateful would quickly become something they ‘get over’.”

Yes, but Brendan pointed out that women in general will react viscerally to anything that threatens women’s leverage over men. It might not threaten the individual woman; but it threatens women as a group; and that means it is at least a possible threat to that individual woman.

It is another example of a woman reacting emotionally even in the face of contrary logic showing the individual woman has nothing to be concerned about.

Mandatory Paternity Testing is just one more way of empowering the Government to interject themselves into our most personal relationships. Haven’t we had enough of that?

Any man who SUSPECTS the child’s paternity, should simply get a swab of the kids saliva and get the DNA tested without the mother’s knowledge. Then he can game plan based on the results.

Trust, but verify. If it turns out he is the Father, he can keep silent and take satisfaction in his knowledge.

And if he finds out the kid is not his, he can set up all of his affairs and pre-plan his course of action BEFORE dropping the bomb on her that he knows she’s a cheating whore and a cuckold.

Remember the first rule of Divorce – the person who makes the first move in a divorce on a partner who doesn’t suspect it’s coming, has a serious advantage. If you find out she’s a cheating cuckold without her knowing you know, you can set everything up to your advantage before you play your cards.

Yes, but Brendan pointed out that women in general will react viscerally to anything that threatens women’s leverage over men. It might not threaten the individual woman; but it threatens women as a group; and that means it is at least a possible threat to that individual woman.

It is another example of a woman reacting emotionally even in the face of contrary logic showing the individual woman has nothing to be concerned about.

Right.

It’s roughly similar when it comes to abortion rights. Opinions on abortion rights are obviously skewed by various factors, and are complex. However, one does often come across statements from women to the effect that they personally think abortion is distasteful and wrong, but they don’t think it should be illegal. Various grounds are offered for this, most of them small-government non-interference type or arguments, or just civil libertarian ones. However, I am firmly convinced that the same principle is at play here — namely that what is really going on is that these women don’t think that they are ever going to be in a position to want an abortion, but in the unlikely event that they/their daughters/their nieces/their granddaughters/their friends are ever in that position, they don’t want it to be illegal. Abortion rights supporters themselves point this out — i.e., the fact that many women who get abortions are actually anti-abortion … until they have an unwanted pregnancy. So for quite a few women, especially unmarried ones, supporting abortion rights is a way of hedging one’s personal bets, even if one is personally convinced one would never be in that position and that if one were, one would not entertain the idea of having one — the abortion rights folks say that the data is otherwise on this.

Obviously, MPT is different from abortion in many ways, and in this specific context one of the main differences is that most conservative Christian churches (conservative Protestants, all Catholics and Orthodox) condemn abortion as being immoral — something which skews more women towards anti-abortion positions than would otherwise be the case. MPT has no such support from the Christian churches, who actually couldn’t care less about paternity fraud as a moral issue apart from subsuming it under the broader heading of adultery — something which gives women more freedom to act viscerally in response to it in an even greater degree than they do with respect to abortion rights.

Speaking of those who really should have read the article before wading in, it seems the whatever has already slunked off. Too bad. I was anticipating her challenging the notion that there were practical restrictions on increasing the number of med students.

So you case is basically:”The government made us restrict supply so we can make bunches of money. We like money.” I’m I honestly supposed to take nonsense like that seriously?

Let’s be honest. Doctor-God is used to being worshiped as Doctor-God and can’t handle the truth. You’d probably go into hysterics if I started talking about all the people who die cause Doctor-God looks after alcoholic totally disfuctional had-to-flee-one-state other Doctor-Gods.

You seem to believe I have to start from the assumption that slwerner and MaMu are “honest joes”. I don’t.

deti says:
“Any woman who KNOWS the man she claims as the father is the only man she has had sex with and is the only man who could possibly be the father should have absolutely NO objection to a paternity test being done on the child. She should welcome the test. She should say “Please, go ahead, do the test. I will not object in any way to your verification of what I know the facts to be.”
Any woman who objects with the “you don’t trust me/you’re accusing me of cheating” canard indicates the man requesting the test has reason to suspect something is up.”
I must say that I fear the parallels with loss of societal privacy (if you’re not doing anything wrong, you shouldn’t mind the government tapping your phone, installing security cameras everywhere, and storing your DNA). I think the relevant difference is that it strongly benefits the other group *which a woman claiming a father should claim to care about*, for extremely little loss to herself, and the man (she claims to care about) does not gain any power over her (other than preventing her from defrauding him) for it.
Hm, every way I put it I continue to see the parallels. I think the emphasis must fall on the fact that a woman (theoretically) cares about the person who wins from this scenario (the father), in a way that citizens do not care about the government and want to sacrifice on its behalf.
Or perhaps I’m just being irrational?

Brendan says:
“But women don’t generally think or act that way when they feel that something threatens the position of women as a whole in their relationship with men as a whole. That is the nature of the “sisterhood”. Women are competitive with each other and tear each other down in a catty way, but when there is a perceived threat to women coming from men and the male interest, women tend to perceive that viscerally and defend the interests of women…”
It speaks to women’s inability to reason that they defend each other to their own detriment. I suspect the only way to really get this through is for enough men to be willing to discard certain women that women as a whole will start to realize it is not beneficial to defend each other.
As reasonably intelligent women have pointed out, other women being slutty degrades the worth of non-slutty women. Similarly, faithful women are only harmed by other women getting away with paternity fraud. Women *should* be shaming other women for making them [faithful/nonslutty women] look bad. The only reason a woman would defend another woman’s actions is if she wants to be able to get away with it herself.
Women defend slutty women so that they won’t be judged for their own sluttiness. A woman defending paternity fraud (or the conditions that allow it) is really just keeping open a space for her to get away with it in the future (whether or not she’ll admit to it, or is even aware of it).
Men would unfortunately need to do enough of change themselves (standing against the reactionary shaming by women) for women to realize that they should support themselves over other women. And given the way women claw over each other to get other things, it seems reasonable that that change could possibly be effected.

DNA testing for paternity is illegal in a number of States.
The doctors and nurses are instructed not to tell named fathers that the child is not his.
A court would have to authorize/damned a paternity test,and they rarely do that,as they obey the feminine imperative.

For instance the State of Michigan states openlt on it’s .gov website that it is “in the best interests of the child’ that the named father (by mother) be made to pay.
Now if bio-dad has more money,often the mother will name him,but is HER initiative that does so.

What it boils down to is that the institutional position is that men have no rights before the Law.

I’ve been late in posting this as it’s futile to argue with fems,but it should stand in the record for posterity,often Dalrock’s article get re-read over the years.

TFH says:
“That criteria has just excluded the majority of women.
Surely by now you see that most women don’t think nearly as far as you do.
They also don’t grasp cause and effect well enough to see the benefits you correctly describe.”
Sorry for the confusion. I do recognise that ‘decent women’ kind of falls into the ‘no true Scotsman’ fallacy.
I was trying to suggest that there wasn’t a basis for women to object, though I agree that a lack of logical basis is no explanation for women to *actually* reject an idea.
My mental solution tends to be to have reasonable expectations for people’s behaviour, and simply not admit into adult society anyone who can’t abide by them (ie. most women). Unfortunately, while that can be done on a personal level, but the boat was missed a long time ago on the societal level. And it’s not easy for men who want to date women to do.

TFH – sorry, I meant to post the above with the two before it, and didn’t realize it hadn’t posted.
more to your latest comment:

TFH says:
“Kai,
Remember that there is a selfish/hypocritical gender and a stupid gender. Not many people are exceptions to the norms of their gender.”
Rather than a dichotomy, I see a collection of bell curves. For any given topic (heigh, IQ, logic comprehension, selflessness, interest in hands-on childrearing, etc), one could generate a bell curve for men, and a separate one for women. The two will generally be overlapping, to differing extents. I don’t care for activists who deny the existence of statistical outliers, but their existence also isn’t reason not to suggest that women in general are ‘X’. And policy generally has to work with the majority, though where possible, leave open some options for the few that are a number of standard deviations out.

As for the specific application here, since women are generally very selfish, if you’re going to get them on board, you have to sell them on their own self-interest (as others have said). My question is how to do that. Men basically need to demonstrate to women that they don’t win when they are slutty, or commit paternity fraud, or any of that. Then women can start to see that it is in their own self-interest to stand above that, and demonstrate that they are not one of those women. They may be more open to things like MPT as a way to demonstrate that they are of a higher quality, and not like ‘those women’ men are scorning.
Or basically, as I see repeated so often around these parts, ‘no rings for sluts’ is basically a first step to changing the dynamic and getting anywhere.

Spacetraveller says:
“Agreed, that to virtuous women (i.e. women who have nothing to fear as to the paternity of their child), paternity testing, whilst initially inherently distateful would quickly become something they ‘get over’.
Yes, the only women who would continue to insist it should NOT be done are the ones who have questionable motives against it.”
But it really needs to be standard to work in that way. If it’s just something everyone gets done, it’s really not a big deal.
If it was implemented as a standard, an individual man could successfully frame it as supporting it for the benefit of *other* men who have questionable wives. ‘not you, honey’.
On an individual level, it’s pretty impossible to get just your wife to believe that you aren’t personally disparaging her if asking for a test.
I’d say men are better off for now just testing their children shortly after birth without the wife’s knowledge, and then taking action if the answer isn’t what they wanted.

Spacetraveller says:
“It looks like we might have no choice in this particular matter if justice is to again reign supreme.
How about resorting to propaganda type campaigns, eg. similar to the anti-smoking or safe sex campaigns in the 80s and 90s? These were successful campaigns, were they not? For the first time since the 40s, people actually cut down on smoking and barrier contraception became popular…”
I don’t think it compares. Telling a woman she shouldn’t smoke because it will hurt her, and shouldn’t have unprotected sex because it could give her AIDS gives her a clear self interest. Telling a woman she should get a paternity test because it will help her husband requires her to do something for his self interest at the expense of hers. That’s not going to work in the same way.
I think the only way you could reasonably implement it is if it could be sold as beneficial to the baby in ways other than establishing paternity. If there was a mandatory screening of parents and children for multiple things – possible genetic defects or blood types, or I don’t know what might be useful. If it just included paternity as part of the standard new set of tests, you could *maybe* convince women it was in their children’s interest. But you’re not going to convince women that it is in their interest to do something against their own interest. Chances are, it would simply have to be forcibly implemented against the inevitable outcry, and our current feminized society could not do that. The suggestions you make would have to help change the society first, so that then ideas like this would have the ability to be implemented.

well just for the heck of it, I looked up California law on paternity testing.

For unmarried men, a paternity claim is not the end of the world as long as the man responds within 30 days after being served notice of it. If his paternity is disproved, the case is dropped as long as he never signed a Voluntary Declaration of Paternity. But he has to act quickly before the court order sets the legal parentage of the child. This is the part where military guys who deploy get screwed because they can’t be served so the court then presumes paternity in those cases and it gets dang difficult at best to get out of that box.

For married men: A child born within a marriage are presumed to be a child of that marriage; the husband and wife are presumed to be the child’s legal parents. From a California government website: “This is called a “conclusive presumption” which means that the presumption (that the child is a child of the married couple) cannot be disproved, even if there is evidence to disprove it.” But then I read the specific section of the Family Code and it states that the husband (or the other man) has two years from the child’s birth to file a motion for testing. So it sounds like the unsuspecting husband is essentially screwed if he waits too long. Doesn’t say whether the husband gets out of paying child support in the event of divorce.

So married men need to remain on their LTR game to keep the wife from straying. To not do that could be an expensive mistake.

As for the specific application here, since women are generally very selfish, if you’re going to get them on board, you have to sell them on their own self-interest (as others have said). My question is how to do that. Men basically need to demonstrate to women that they don’t win when they are slutty, or commit paternity fraud, or any of that. Then women can start to see that it is in their own self-interest to stand above that, and demonstrate that they are not one of those women. They may be more open to things like MPT as a way to demonstrate that they are of a higher quality, and not like ‘those women’ men are scorning.
Or basically, as I see repeated so often around these parts, ‘no rings for sluts’ is basically a first step to changing the dynamic and getting anywhere.

Fools errand, I’m afraid, Kai.

Women do not reason morally as men do. See Carol Gilligan’s works. Appealing to women on the basis of self-interest or any other kind of moral reasoning generally doesn’t work, as women prefer to reason morally in a very specific context, which means that they generally prefer laws that permit them freedom of action to determine for themselves what is moral in any given context.

Kai
“As for the specific application here, since women are generally very selfish, if you’re going to get them on board, you have to sell them on their own self-interest (as others have said).”

TFH says:
“I think this is very hard, especially because most women don’t understand cause and effect very well.
…
The deafening silence of paternal grandmothers on the issue of losing their grandkids to the ex-daugher-in-law, reveals volumes.”

Brendan says:
“Fools errand, I’m afraid, Kai.
Women do not reason morally as men do. See Carol Gilligan’s works. Appealing to women on the basis of self-interest or any other kind of moral reasoning generally doesn’t work, as women prefer to reason morally in a very specific context, which means that they generally prefer laws that permit them freedom of action to determine for themselves what is moral in any given context.”

to Brendan – I agree that there is a major failure in reasoning. If wanting to appeal to a woman, it usually has to be an emotional pull to her self-interest. I don’t think we have the cultural basis at this time to be able to set that up, so it’s really a next step on several other changes.

To TFH – That’s a very interesting question. I can certainly see it as a demonstration of the inability to connect causes with effects. A couple things that come to mind on the topic:
I have heard of a ‘grandparents’ rights’* movement growing, in which grandparents attempt to claim a right to visitation and interest in their grandchild, separately from the parental rights of their children. I have heard this invoked by grandparents whose child is now separated from the custodial parent**, as well as an attempt to override disagreements with their children (as traditionally you have to make nice with your child to see your child’s children). I don’t know how much steam the movement is getting, but perhaps that’s women’s solution. Enshrine their right to determine any and all parents in the child’s life with no input (beyond money) from a man when young, and then demand the right of grandparents to access their grandchildren even if their daughter-in-law divorces their son. No need for a woman to make nice with a man anywhere along the way – it becomes solely her right as mother, then she can demand additional rights as a grandmother.
On the other hand, I am curious as to what paternal grandmothers stand to lose. Are grandparents really that involved in children’s lives these days, such that losing access is a big blow? With the steady dissolution of the family, plus the way people seem to move around the country, I wonder if there is that big a crowd of paternal grandmothers involved in their grandchildren’s lives until their son’s divorce to make an outcry? (I’m not saying there isn’t. I’m not up to date on these trends. I’m just wondering as to the relevant state of families. I wonder whether the second generation even stands to lose.)

*I don’t have stats, and don’t claim to know what amount of movement. Just something I’ve heard around. Interestingly, when I googled ‘Grandparents rights’, the first 28 links were all Canadian. Then a wikipedia article that mentioned the states, and back to more Canadian links, though I didn’t look further. Perhaps this is something with more traction in Canada?
**I don’t mean to deny the overwhelming likelihood that the custodial parent is the mother and the one being divorced the father. Just was speaking in generalities in the paragraph.

At heart, I think the only likely way to implement something like MPT is for the government to simply decree it. And that cannot happen unless the government is able to act against the interests of women, which requires a number of prerequisite changes.

“But you may notice, if you have not already, that there is a strange aversion to activism among a lot of men in the androsphere. Even more so from so-called Men’s Rights Activists.”

I did not know this, given that I am not privy to what men of The Manosphere do outside of The Manosphere.
I can only see what they write within the confines of The Manosphere.

What you claim *does* surprise me. Are you saying that The Manosphere is simply just ‘talk and no action’ then?
That seems counterintuitive…

Kai,

“Telling a woman she should get a paternity test because it will help her husband requires her to do something for his self interest at the expense of hers. That’s not going to work in the same way.
I think the only way you could reasonably implement it is if it could be sold as beneficial to the baby in ways other than establishing paternity…”

Kai, you are at liberty to frame the campaign in whichever manner you like! The important thing is to get the message out there…
Yes, the clever thing to do would be to appeal to women’s sense of justice. So if you think that selling it in such a way as to appear to her that it is Baby who benefits rather than men, then do it that way. You shouldn’t care what motivates her to have the test, what you should be caring about is that she does it.

And someone also mentioned that an individual virtuous woman being asked to do a paternity test will find it more distasteful than if this just happens to be the law, and therefore ALL women are required to do it.
I agree. If you view paternity testing as an implied suspicion of sluttiness (which it is), something which no woman likes to be associated with (even if this association is true), it is understandable that in individual cases, it is going to be unpleasant for both the innocent and the guilty woman, indeed MORE unpleasant for the innocent.

This is why any campaign, whilst by virtue of its very existence, gets the job done for men, needs to be sensitive to the sensibilities of women. This is a case of losing a tiny battle to win the war.

As to the Church’s stance on paternity testing, I can understand why paternity testing will NOT be supported by The Church.
The need for paternity testing is, afterall, an admission that The Church has failed in imparting a sense of morality to the women of society.
Is it any wonder that The Church doesn’t want this rubbed in its face?

Again, there are ways to get The Church on board with this. But this involves a certain degree of subtlety also.
There is an awful lot of ‘tiptoeing’ around various groups with this issue.
But I don’t really see how the goal can be reached without this ‘tiptoeing’.

Perhaps it is in your nature as men to be more direct and ‘forward charging’?
I, on the other hand, have no problem with ‘ducking and diving’ and taking the longer, more tedious ‘scenic route’. In this sense, I don’t mind being ‘cowardly’. Whereas, perhaps you guys can’t stand to have to take the ‘indirect’ route and risk being labelled a ‘sissy’?
Is this what is going on??

On the subject of female doctors, the incredibly negative impacts are very real and quantifiable, a lot of that is easily available, for anyone to see. The British system was repeatedly brought up, and it’s a perfect example.

In the UK the laws designed to give ‘equal opportunity’ to women in medicine has resulted in over half of all medical students there being female. As a result of this policy, any of them are there solely because of their gender. Which means that lots of men who would have made better doctors than many of the women that got in didn’t. Considering far more people will need to visit a doctor than become one, including women, this policy right off the bat will negatively affect far more women (those receiving poorer medical care) than it will help (those few women that get a pussy pass into med school). But that is a simple truth for any such discriminatory policy. If you want to see excellent points on just how harmful any type of affirmative action/employment equity is, both to those ‘benefiting’ from it and society at large, there are two excellent economists, Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams, who have written and researched this better than anyone else. They are also black men who grew up during segregation, and who argued against all of these equity type laws back when they were first being passed.

Here are some actual numbers for you. In the UK, with its public health care system, 60% of all female doctors will leave the profession in 10 years. A survey done by the British Medical Association found that 30% of women medical students planned on working full-time, vs. 75% of male students. In addition, women doctors like to work regular hours. As a result, there are shortages of doctors in various specialities like surgery, anaesthesiology, etc., where you have to work on call, because a patient might not be able to wait until you can see them during your abbreviated work week. Although of course in the UK, with its public healthcare, people have to wait until they can be seen, because that’s the only game in town. But it’s ‘free’ right?

And what does the NHS have to do to make up for the fact that so many of the resources spent on women doctors get pissed away, and they’re tremendously short-staffed? Why bring in doctors from abroad of course. In 2003 alone, over 11,000 health professionals were granted work visas to the UK from just four countries in sub-Saharan Africa. What was the relative cost to these nations to train these folks, and I guess things are going so well down there that they don’t really need those thousands of doctors. Sums it all up right there, a few thousand white women in the UK benefit from being empowered to play career women, while untold thousands of black women will suffer and die because their doctors left for the UK to make up for the gaping hole in the NHS directly attributable to ‘gender equity’.

If someone has a hard time understanding how just these few facts do not constitute massive malinvestment, then they are completely ignorant of economics. Again, Sowell and Williams have written many approachable books on economic, and I would recommend Sowell’s Basic Economics as a starting-point.

There is much more that can be said of just how badly the NHS has been affected by teh wimminz, and as it has already been said more eloquently than I can, I will provide the link:

Paul, your link is to a crank blog (advocating a hire bar) and his citations are to newspaper articles. You are going to have to do better than that if you want to substantiate implausible assertions (e.g. 70% of those in a demanding course of study are planning to work part-time).

“If you start posting videos, though, I will encourage you loudly and often. A few others will too.”

Sorry, no can do. I possess none of the director/producer skills necessary to make a video.
At best, this would have to be a collaboration.
I am hapy to provide the ‘script’. I think that’s where my ‘talent’ lies, if you can call it that.

Whose ‘voice’ should be presented on the video?
Well, in my thinking, if you want to appeal to *women*, it should be a woman’s voice.

Something like this…

It was January 15th, 2013.
I was at ‘Toys R Us’ looking for a train-set for Pete. I was thinking to myself how I always seemed to be darkening the doors of this particular shop. Just a month ago, I was here, picking up Christmas presents for all the kids. Now I was back, looking for a birthday present for Pete, who was about to turn 6 on Saturday.

I’ll never forget that day. The day I got the phone call that shattered my entire family.

When my phone rang, I almost didn’t answer it. Then I saw it was from Jack.
‘Oh what does he want now’, I wondered, as I picked up.

‘Tess, it’s me’.
Jack always felt the need to announce himself when he called. Like he thought I wouldn’t recognise his voice or something. After 38 years. I smiled.
I wasn’t prepared for what came next.

‘Pete’s not mine.’
His voice was shaking.

‘What do you mean, Pete’s not yours?’, I asked, suddenly feeling the need to sit down.

‘Just that, Tess. He’s not mine. He’s not my son.’

I did sit down at this point. I must have looked really ill, because a staff member from ‘Toys R Us’ came over and asked if I was alright.

Flashes of Jack’s wedding whizzed through my mind. He looked so happy on that day, as was I, my sister Josie and of course our parents. My baby brother was finally ‘settling down’. Rachel looked so radiant in her Versace wedding dress.

When Jack was born three years later, my father joked in the delivery room that he could now die in peace. There was now an ‘heir’ to the Robinson throne. Josie and I rolled our eyes. Of course, *our* little boys didn’t count. ‘Cos they weren’t *Robinsons* afterall.
Little did I know how prophetic Dad’s words will be.

When 2 years ago, he died of a heart attack, Jack said at his funeral, ‘Dad, I am so happy that I gave you your heir before you left us’. There wasn’t a dry eye in the church after that.

But I was confused. Pete looked *so* much like Jack. How could he *not* be his?
The brown hair, the green eyes, the way he walked.
*How*?
My heart raced as I thought about *how* I would tell Mum. I knew Jack wouldn’t be able to. Mum adored Pete. I secretly thought that he was her favourite grandchild. And I knew she shared Dad’s feelings about him being the ‘heir’.

‘Jack, are you still there?’
‘Yes, Tess.’ I could tell he was crying.
‘Jack, I’m coming over.’

You get the picture…Imagine what a professional writer could come up with. I’m just an amateur.

You then give some statistics, eg. 15% of all children born in the US are not the biological children of the man they call Dad.Then comes the punchline.
Paternity testing. Do it for Jack.
Do it. For Pete’s sake.

If someone showed *me* a video like this, my first reaction would be, ‘Where do I sign?’
Seriously.

Sneaky?
Of course. (It is supposed to be).
Dark? Evil?
No.

We women PAY to go see tearjerkers like this all the time. 🙂
It would be like a public service for women. Except, you are drawing feminine sympathies towards men. Win-win situation.

I’ve been reading your blog with interest for several months. I’m a lawyer and I understand from this and other posts that, as well as pushing for social and cultural change, you also take the view that legal reforms are necessary to restore justice in North America and Western Europe. As a Christian and a woman, I do think there ought to be changes in the law governing divorce and child custody but I get the impression that you want to wind back the whole set of feminist changes to law (ie c19th onward in England and various US states). Is that right? In roughly reverse chronological order, that would be a programme of

– Getting rid of affirmative action / quota policies for women in education and employment
– Reducing the grounds of divorce: getting rid of no-fault divorce in the states where that exists as well as eliminating vague grounds like ‘unreasonable behaviour’ in England. Cutting it back to adultery, insanity and cruelty as before, or abolish the whole concept and simply retain annulment.

– Getting rid of the presumption in favour of maternal custody of children where couples divorce/ unmarried parents divorce. Restore a presumption of paternal custody and/or a link to fault for the divorce.

– Abolish the concept of alimony in divorce; no redistribution of property rights in the event of divorce.

– Abolish the concept of sexual harrassment in the workplace as a form of discrimination.

– Abolish the rule forbidding discrimination on the grounds of sex in the provision of services (like education) and in employment

– Abolish female suffrage

– Restore the doctrine of coverture so that a married couple are a single legal person in law and the wife lacks personality for the purposes of holding property rights and contract.

Would you be in favour of winding right back to pre-1800 or are there some legal changes in the status of women which you would maintain? I am asking out of genuine interest because I’m really not sure exactly how deep your arguments run – i.e. whether you are making a c19th liberal argument in favour of legal equality between men and women + a sex-neutral argument in favour of reducing the incidence of divorce (so all the family law changes above, plus the affirmative action and sexual harassment stuff) or a social conservative argument that sex difference should be reflected in the law in order to preserve the family structure (ie wind right back to coverture). To lay my cards on the table, I’m persuaded of the first set of arguments but not the second and I don’t know which one

I obviously can’t speak for all women, but I can say that I personally am in favor of paternity testing, even if it were to be something automatically done for every single birth. I think that paternity fraud is one of the most disgusting and violating deceptions a woman can perpetrate against a man, and ultimately against her own children. If my husband had asked for a paternity test at the time of our children’s birth, or even now, I would gladly assent to one. I have nothing to fear because I was faithful during our marriage. I would gladly see any woman prosecuted that cowardly perpetrates a vile paternity lie in order to extract resources from a man.

As for my own situation in regards to alimony and child support, while I’m disappointed and rightly feel betrayed my husband’s lack of respect for his marriage vows, I have no intention of “fleecing” him financially in any sort of vengeful way. I regularly express gratitude to him for providing for me and the children and he knows that my ultimate goal is to attain financial independence from him. My dignity and moral code would not allow me to extract resources from him indefinitely nor would I seek to legally strong arm him into giving me exorbitant amounts of money that he breaks his back to earn. I see the alimony as a tempory and necessary crutch as I transition from being a housewife to being a single mother. I wish more than anything that he would have honored his vow to me, but he didn’t and me being greedy and asserting rights to that which doesn’t belong to me isn’t going to change that or really contribute to an amicable relationship with him, which is in the best interests of our children.

Sorry for the delay, but I wanted to at least skim through the comments before responding. The fact that women initiate divorce at a rate that is a multiple of men (2x-3x), is proof positive that there are serious financial incentives favoring women, namely the ridiculously lopsided custody results and the anachronism that is alimony coupled with no-fault divorce. Given the very large sample size (the number of divorces every year in the U.S.), it defies credulity to posit that women are not far more incentivized relative to men to seek divorce.

You need to view the relative net gains a typical divorcing woman derives from the process. By way of child support alone (which she will almost always get unless she chooses not to have custody), she extracts a sizable portion of the husband’s income stream for which she does not have to answer. On top of that she can extract another big hunk of his pay via alimony in many jurisdictions. In exchange for this windfall (in my ex’s case it’s about 30% of my gross salary), she gives up 100% of her responsibilities to the marriage.

Except for the uber rich, it is mathematically impossible for any divorcing family not to be far economically worse off post-divorce than prior, including women, despite their child support/alimony streams of income. The economist would look at the situation (as Dalrock’s study points out) and recognize that the avoidance of the cost of the continued marital obligation needs to be factored in. In the case of divorcing women, one is forced to conclude that, in general, they’re either a.) irrational economic actors (because they don’t full appreciate the ultimate diminution in their post-divorce standard of living) or b.) rational economic actors because they value their post-divorce freedom (the avoided marital obligations) more than their loss of financial status. So which is it?

Note: In some cases, a divorcing woman can enhance her material wellbeing by way of re-marrying and leveraging the ongoing child support.

As to why ‘some people can negotiate divorces’ apparently amicably. They are not nearly as friendly as you may think as the parties are bargaining in the shadow of the law. One of these parties (the man), as Dalrock points out, knows that the best he can do is plea bargain for a reduced sentence. He has no practical hope in the family courts in this country of ever ‘proving his innocence’.

I would agree with this. I would abolish affirmative action on all grounds including race, gender and for all other special interest/grievance groups.

“- Reducing the grounds of divorce: getting rid of no-fault divorce in the states where that exists as well as eliminating vague grounds like ‘unreasonable behaviour’ in England. Cutting it back to adultery, insanity and cruelty as before, or abolish the whole concept and simply retain annulment.”

I would keep no fault divorce but penalize it. I’d require a 2-year waiting period of continuous living separate and apart. The divorcing spouse forfeits alimony with prejudice forever, and forfeits child custody except in the most extreme circumstances. I would preserve grounds divorce for adultery, abuse, abandonment and addiction — that’s it.

“Abuse” means only real, violent, physical abuse which places the spouse or others living with the couple in danger of death or serious bodily harm. “Addiction” means hopeless dependence on substances. “Addiction” to me does not mean “he looks at porn” or “he plays video games”. “Adultery” means sexual conduct with a person other than one’s spouse. It does not include looking at porn. “Abandonment” means leaving the marital household with intent not to return. It also includes unreasonable or chronic withholding sex from the spouse.

“- Getting rid of the presumption in favour of maternal custody of children where couples divorce/ unmarried parents divorce. Restore a presumption of paternal custody and/or a link to fault for the divorce.”

I would agree with this. I would presume paternal custody of children. I would hold that that at fault spouse, whether husband or wife, forfeits custody esp. for abuse, abandonment or addiction. Same with the wife.

“- Abolish the concept of alimony in divorce; no redistribution of property rights in the event of divorce.”

I would agree with no alimony except in extreme circumstances in which the wife is not at fault, she proves she is completely financially dependent on the at-fault husband, and she proves she has no means of financial support other than alimony; but I would cap alimony at a percentage and time limit it to no more than 3 years, which is more than enough time for a 21st century single woman to get her feet back under her.

“- Abolish the concept of sexual harrassment in the workplace as a form of discrimination.”

I would sharply limit the definition of sexual harassment to quid pro quo and to outrageous hostile environment/retaliation cases. The definition of sex harassment in practice in the US is ridiculous. It essentially amounts to “sexual or quasi-sexual conduct by unattractive men” and “any conduct by anyone that any woman doesn’t like”.

No, but I would require a wife claiming husband rape prove penetration by actual physical force without implied consent and supported by competent evidence of force and penetration. “I was drunk”, “I didn’t really want to but I did anyway” isn’t sufficient.

“- Abolish the rule forbidding discrimination on the grounds of sex in the provision of services (like education) and in employment”

No. I’m OK with women working. But I might carve out exceptions for bona fide occupational qualifications and for the hiring organization’s needs (i.e. it wants to hire men for employee continuity, noting that women often marry or have children and leave the work force)”

“- Abolish female suffrage”

I’m not there yet.

“- Restore the doctrine of coverture so that a married couple are a single legal person in law and the wife lacks personality for the purposes of holding property rights and contract.”

No, men and women have equal agency, property rights and freedom to contract.

But spouses should not be liable for a spendthrift spouse.
A wife ought not be able to obtain an abortion without the husband’s consent.
In the alternative, a husband should not be required to pay for a wife’s abortion obtained without his consent.
And, a wife’s obtaining an abortion without his consent ought to be grounds for immediate divorce.

Switching the practice to the rebuttable presumption of joint physical custody would kill the divorce rate. That is — it’s presumed that physical custody will be equally shared unless there are substantial reasons for it not to be (and those reasons are limited to abuse, addiction, abandonment, or similar reasons, not “I work long hours” reasons — you work long hours and can’t have custody of your kids, then don’t divorce, be a fucking adult). If this were the default setting subject to being rebutted for the reasons I set out above, the filing rate would crater. People would learn to live with stuff all of a sudden.

Joint physical custody (i.e. where the children physically reside which each parent a roughly equal amount of time) would also negate or sharply reduce child support. After all, if ex husband has the kids one week and ex wife has them the next, for example, then there is no reason for the transfer of resources from one spouse to another.

It would reduce c/s, that’s true, but the read driver would be not permitting the woman to de facto control the kids independently post-divorce, but instead require that to be shared. That’s the real driver here — the idea that women can basically control everything, get a check from icky ex-H, and have the kids “visit” him now and again. That’s the driver. Remove that driver, and the divorce rate plummets. Maybe people are “less happy in their marriages”, but outcomes are better for kids (the stats on that say that the better outcomes for kids in intact families are independent of the marital happiness of the parents, provided there isn’t physical violence).

I’ve been reading your blog with interest for several months. I’m a lawyer and I understand from this and other posts that, as well as pushing for social and cultural change, you also take the view that legal reforms are necessary to restore justice in North America and Western Europe. As a Christian and a woman, I do think there ought to be changes in the law governing divorce and child custody but I get the impression that you want to wind back the whole set of feminist changes to law (ie c19th onward in England and various US states). Is that right?…

Welcome to the blog Gwen,

I don’t have a formal answer for you bullet by bullet but the suggestions by Deti, Empath, and Brendan seem reasonable to me at least on first review. What I would say beyond that is we don’t need to be in agreement on all of those items. From a practical perspective there is zero risk that things like women’s suffrage are going to be rolled back. This is part of our governing structure and I don’t see it as something to even question. If by some wildly unlikely chance I end up as part of a constitutional assembly following the end of the world as we know it, I’ll hear both sides out at the time. In the meantime, I’m not going to waste any mental energy considering it.

On women working, the only exclusions I would put in place would be serving in combat units or in other military positions where their existence would likely lower unit effectiveness and/or cohesion. If we can afford to use the military as a social engineering program then we must have a bigger military than we really need. The other part I do have an opinion on is what I refer to as the “feminist merit badge”. I suspect that most women would agree with me here once they got past the initial reaction to what appears to be a man attacking “team woman”. I respect women who excel in their chosen field and take their work seriously. I also respect women who choose to focus on raising a family, as well as women who blend the two with an eye towards practicality over ego. What I see as an issue is the minority but too common practice of using education and career as a badge to be obtained before pressuring a man into marriage so they can quit working and carp about how a man stole their dreams. Not only is this wasteful but it tends to marginalize and shame the women who choose to focus on family while insulting the women who are working for reasons other than pure ego. No action needs to be taken here in my opinion though, because this is a risky strategy which will eventually blow up in one generation’s face. Along the same lines, I think we need to fine tune areas like the one in the NY times article I linked to above. If we did this right we might have 10% fewer women in med school but the ones who didn’t attend would be the ones who weren’t really serious about the profession anyway. By the same token I would apply the same rules to men and discourage men from filling those seats who didn’t plan on really practicing.

At any rate, as I mentioned in the beginning you don’t have to agree with me to read or even participate. This would be an awfully boring place if everyone agreed with me. I would shutter the blog if commenters started posting Rush Limbaugh style “mega dittos” comments. By the same token keep in mind that each commenter’s comments only reflect their own viewpoint, even if I don’t swoop in and tell them they are wrong. I reserve the right to participate in the discussion, but I also am careful to avoid my life turning into this. There are several main points of view in the manosphere, and even within the main “camps” there is much diversity of opinion.

One more thought. I reserve the right to learn. I’ve learned far more from writing this blog than I can possibly have taught. If you think I’ve gotten something all wrong, please do me the favor of trying to help me see the light. I won’t guarantee that I’ll change my mind, but at the very least we should both end up better understanding why we hold different views.

Regarding no-fault divorce. I think the problem is actually more specific – we need to abolish *unilateral* no-fault divorce. Basically, if two people genuinely decide they don’t want to be married any more (and file a joint petition), they are adults and can do that. Physical custody will be shared 50/50, with no money going in either direction.
But unilateral divorce (filed by one person) puts all onus on the spouse who wants the divorce. They are presumed to be the one at fault unless they can prove it is the other way around. and the person ‘at fault’ must be the one to move out of the marital residence, and forfeits custody of the children. They also cannot receive alimony (whether it should exist as a possibility from the person at fault to the one not is something I’m not certain about and would need to think more) .
So a woman is welcome to unilaterally divorce her husband any time she wants – but only if she leaves all the money and all the kids with him. Same goes for a husband.
It puts all the power in the hands of the person who wants to stay married, while the person who wants to leave must either convince her spouse, or get nothing. That removes all the incentive to walk out, and all the power in doing so.
So nice and simple. Unless it’s a joint petition, there must be a fault, and the fault is on the filing spouse unless they prove otherwise.

On the one hand, a woman who doesn’t work is ridiculed (‘Duchess Dolittle’, AKA Kate Wales).
On the other, a woman who DOES work is treated with derision (‘Career b*tch’).

On the one hand, a woman who makes the decision to have children is criticised for doing so.
On the other, a woman who foregoes the maternal route is confronted at every opportunity with data showing declining birth rates in the West.

On the one hand a woman who takes time out – sometimes permanently – after having children: she has left a void at work that makes her workplace suffer as a result.
On the other, a woman who doesn’t leave work after having kids: she is a heartless b*tch with no maternal instinct, eg. Rachida Dati, French (parliamentary) minister who took exactly 4 days maternity leave after having her daughter. The French press had a field day wth that one.

Kudos to Gwen (capital ‘G’) for asking questions.
Whilst I like Deti’s and Dalrock’s reasoned answers, I suspect they are not the majority view.

The harrowing story of Gwen (small ‘g’) shows me exactly why it is never wrong that parents say to their daughter: ‘Learn a trade, study hard at school. These are uncertain times. Your brother will always be able to put food on HIS table. You, on the other hand, once you have children, will suddenly run the risk of becoming vulnerable (this risk may remain theoretical, yes, but the risk is still there). You can mitigate that risk with an education and a profession’.

We all moan about single mothers on welfare, or those who unfairly gain ‘cash and prizes’ from ex-husbands.
And yet, we are unsympathetic towards women who work to support themselves!

@spacetraveller – I completely agree. My focus always was to be a wife and mother. Although I did go to college, I never graduated. Once I became a wife, and shortly thereafter a mother, I was content to be *just* that. I was naive enough to believe that my marriage was forever…and now that my delusions have been shattered, I’m in the unenviable position of being completely financially vulnerable to a man. Fortunately, I’m intelligent and capable so I’m confident that I will find a way to support myself. Because of my experience, I will definitely encourage my girls to complete their education while also encouraging them to cultivate qualities that will make them a good wife and mother.